Input gathering system and method for defining, refining or validating star schema for a source database

Abstract

An automated input gathering system for defining, refining or validating a data warehouse star schema for a given data source. The automated data input gathering system includes a source metadata analysis module, an operational reporting environment analysis module, a usage analysis module and a data profiling module. To automatically ascertain inputs for warehouse definition, refinement or validation like i) list of entities and most relevant ones ii) entity column types and lengths iii) entity keys iv) relationships between entities v) relationships within entities vi) entity and column update frequencies vii) grouping of entity and column updates viii) specialized entities ix) workflow and correlated attributes and x) commonly used measures the source metadata analysis module programmatically analyzes source metadata documentation or API's; the operational reporting environment analysis module analyzes underlying models, reports and dashboards; the usage analysis module analyzes queries on the source database; and the data profiling module analyzes data in the source database.