The Design Of Data Warehouse Platform For E-Commerce

Data warehousing and e-commerce are two of the most rapidly expanding fields in recent information technologies. A data warehouse is an integrated data repository containing historical data of a corporation for supporting decision-making processes. A data warehouse provides a basis for online analytic processing and data mining for improving business intelligence by turning data into information and knowledge. Since technologies for e-commerce are being rapidly developed and e-businesses are rapidly expanding, analyzing e-business environments using data warehousing technology could enhance significant business intelligence. A well-designed data warehouse would feed business with the right information at the right time in order to make the right decisions in ecommerce environments.In this paper, we discuss the design of data warehouses for e-commerce environment. We discuss requirement analysis, logical design, and physical design issues in e-commerce environments. We have collected an extensive set of interesting OLAP queries for e-commerce environments, and classified them into categories. Based on these OLAP queries, we illustrate our design with data warehouse bus architecture, dimension table structures, a base star schema, and an aggregation star schema. We finally present various physical design considerations for implementing the dimensional models.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives a brief introduction to data warehouse technology. Section 3 illustrates the necessary components of a data warehouse platform and especially discusses some e-commerce environment specific issues. Section 4 presents requirement analysis, logical design and physical design issues in e-commerce environment. Section 5 covers the implementation of a high performance and scaled data warehouse platform. Section 6 concludes our paper and discusses further research issues in designing data warehouses for e-commerce.