Research On User Requirements-Driven Reference Model For Data Warehouse

The model of the data warehouse is the basis of the it and plays a key role for the success of the system. But in practice, because of the time and cost constraints, we did't do it very well, and sometimes even skip, which may cause a series of problems in the process of the system develop.The reference model can solve this problem effectively, it provides a base model, and it also can be expanded to adapt to different problems, so we not only savings both time and cost effectively,but also enrich the complete development process and ensure the performance of the system.This paper introduced the existing methods to built a data warehouse reference model first, these methods can be divided into three kind,one is user requirements-driven,the other is data-driven, and the third is goal-driven,and then analysis the advantage and disadvantage of them, and point out that user requirements-driven method is a good one, because user requirements is the fundamental to build the data warehouse. Whether the system we established can meet the user requirements to determine the success or failure of the system directly, but data-driven or goal-driven modeling method facing the potential risk of inconsistency with the user requirements.After the analysis and contrasts of the existing methods,this paper proposed an user-driven reference model. The model based on user requirements,according to the process of the modeling, and was set up step by step, from user requirements to the conceptual model and then to logical model. So it has a clear structure,and can provide an effective reference for the data warehouse modeling process. Then how to get the user requirements were discussed, and a method were given. Finally, an example was given to illustrate that this model has it's value to reference.