Designing and creating relational schemas with a CWM-based tool

ABSTRACT

Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) is a standard XML-based metamodel for describing data warehouse models, allowing these models to be exchanged between different environments in a unified and convenient way. As part of warehousing environment, several database management systems begin to support export of database schemas to CWM metadata, but still there is no CWM-based tool that helps with the design of databases and also the creation of database schemas. This paper presents a design and development of a tool called ER2CWM that creates CWM relational database schemas from physical data models represented by ER diagrams. The tool supports the creation of ER diagrams, transformation into CWM format, and creation of database schemas for relational database management systems. It can also transform database schemas back into CWM and ER diagrams respectively. With this tool, database designers are facilitated at database design, creation, and maintenance via a standard CWM format that can also be ported for use in other environments.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
CWM, ER diagrams, relational databases