Credits: 6 ECTS

Objectives

Each organization uses the historical data accumulated with the operational system to produce summary information to facilitate appropriate decision-making processes and make them more quick and objectives. The course presents the approach that involves the design and implementation of specific databases, the data warehouse, to produce synthetic data interactively. It also describes the new requirements that these problems pose to the DBMS technology to enable rapid interactive analysis of large amounts of data.

Ogni organizzazione utilizza i dati storici accumulati con il sistema informatico operazionale per produrre informazioni sintetiche adatte a facilitare i processi decisionali e renderli più veloci ed obiettivi. Il corso presenta l’approccio che prevede il progetto e la realizzazione di particolari basi di dati, dette data warehouse, a partire dalle quali si procede con opportune interrogazioni per produrre interattivamente dati di sintesi. Si presentano anche i nuovi requisiti che questi problemi pongono alla tecnologia dei sistemi per basi di dati per rendere possibili analisi interattive rapide di grandi quantità di dati.

Syllabus

• Decision Support Systems and Business Intelligence.
• Data Models for Data Warehouses and On-line Analytical Processing.
• Data Warehouses Conceptual and Logical Design.
• Data Analysis Using SQL
• Data Warehouse Systems Technology: Indexes, Star Query Optimization.
• Algorithms for Selecting Materialized Views.
• Query Rewrite Methods to Use Materialized Views.
• Case studies.

Teaching methods

Lectures with exercises and discussion of students’ solutions

Prerequisites

Fundamentals of relational systems: Database Modeling, Relational algebra, Normalization, SQL querying

Evaluation

Oral exam on the basis of a written test

Compulsory course material

The course material will be updated as we progress through the semester.

• A. Albano, Decision Support Databases Essentials, Università di Pisa, Department of Computer Science, 2013
• Decision Support Databases Essentials: Solutions to Exercises
• Examples of Written Exams with Solutions

References Books

• M. Golfarelli and S. Rizzi, Data Warehouse Design: Modern Principles and Methodologies, McGraw-Hill, 2009.
• R. Kimball, M. Ross, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Wiley, 2nd edition, 2002.
• C. Adamson, M. Venerable, Data Warehouse. Design Solutions , John Wiley & Son, New York, 1998.
• For a comprehensive list of Data Warehouse and OLAP papers (with links to full papers) see: http://www.ondelette.com/OLAP/dwbib.html