An Automatic Data Warehouse Conceptual Design Approach

2. Generation of constellation schemes, which inte- Star Schema Generation

grates star schemes relevant to the same domain
and that may have common dimensions.
To present the algorithms of these two types of
schema generation, we will use the following nota-
tion.
− Dim(s): the set of dimensions in an nD-F sheet s,
− Hier(d): the hierarchy of a dimension d,
− Meas(s): the set of measures in an nD-F sheet s.
The algorithm shown in Box 1 (Nabli, Soussi, Feki,
Ben-Abdallah & Gargouri, 2005) generates star
schemes. In this algorithm, the t nD-F sheets are first
partitioned into domains; this ensures that each star
schema is generated for one domain. In turn, this will
reduce the number of comparisons used in the constel-
lation schema generation phase (see next section). A
star schema is constructed for each fact (Fj) in steps
3.2.2. to 3.2.5.
Example: Let us extend the previous SALE example
with the two additional sheets shown in Figure 4. The

Figure 4. T2 and T3 two sheets for the SALE fact

Commercial T2
SALE Product (unit-price, prod-name) /H_category
( Qty, Amount)
category

Date Year Quarter Month

H_Year

Commercial T3
SALE Client (Name, First-name)/H_age
( Qty, Revenue)
Age

Slice

Date Year Semester Month

H_Year

Figure 5. Star schema built from T1, T2, and T3 sheets

R egion Slice

Department Age
City First-Name
Name
IdClient
Client

Y ear Day SA L E
Quarter
Qty
Date R evenue Product-Name
Semester Month IdDate A mount Unit-Price
IdProd Category
Product
Sub-Category