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CWM is targeted at six categories of users:
1. Warehouse platform and tool vendors
2. Professional service providers
3. Warehouse developers
4. Warehouse administrators
5. End users
6. Information technology managers
These users participate in one or more of the following four stages in the development and usage of CWM-based data warehouses:
1. Establishment - Implementing and deploying CWM, including a Repository Common Facility (as shown in the Preface’s OMG Metadata Repository Architecture figure).
2. Build - Exercising CWM to define a baseline data warehouse configuration (establishing the exchange paths between known data sources and targets).
3. Operation - Operating the CWM-based data warehouse.
4. Maintenance - Exercising CWM to define changes in data warehouse configuration (to cover changes as small as the addition of more elements of a type already in the configuration and as large as merger with or replacement by another configuration).
This chapter presents usage scenarios that illustrate activities in the Build and Maintenance steps.
Table 2-1 shows how CWM benefits users in data warehouse development and usage.
Table 2-1 Value of CWM to Users
User Category |
Stage |
Problem or Need |
Tools and Repositories |
How CWM promotes better Data Warehouse utilization |
|
| Warehouse platform and tool vendors | Build | Must subscribe to standards for inter-vendor interconnect. | • CWM • OMG Repository Common Facility • Tools for modeling, development, deployment, and system management | CWM provides a common backplane for pluggable subsystems. It is a globally usable notation for metadata exchange protocols, which enables flexible distribution of enterprise services over a heterogeneous collection of systems. | |
| Professional service providers | Build | Must accumulate and reuse objects from service engagement. | Third party and in-house tools that apply CWM metadata to concrete database catalogs and vice versa. | Reusable, editable, and extensible CWM metadata provides an asset base that builds value. This base of reusable objects starts a self-reinforcing feedback loop with continually increasing returns (improved engagement productivity). | |
| Professional service providers | Maintenance | Must modify configuration: knowing what and where to modify; knowing dependency closure. | Third party or in-house tools to manage reconfiguration editing of a warehouse model. | CWM exposes the information required to modify a model. Context definition and self-describing features of CWM are used to isolate dependency relationships. | |
| Professional service providers, warehouse administrators | Maintenance | Must integrate existing tools and data which adhere to standards other than CWM into a data warehouse configuration. | Tools based on CWM's ability to incorporate metamodels of legacy, web, proprietary, and alternate metadata definition practices and standards. | CWM provides submodels supporting details of information held in a variety of different formats, including XML, Relational SQL, and conventional file formats. | |
| Warehouse administrators | Build | Must establish and manage expressions, relationships, and lineage over multiple database schemata. | Tools that use built-in facilities of CWM to define schema content, relationships, and lineage. | CWM design is based on need to manage such information at multiple levels. The Transformation and Warehouse Operation packages are designed to allow navigation of metadata correlated to schemata. | |
| Warehouse administrators | Maintenance | Must add, subtract, re-partition, reallocate, or merge resources in deployment configuration. | System management tools. | CWM consists of models of metadata that assist in making such changes and allow impact of these changes to be assessed. |
Table 2-1 Value of CWM to Users
User Category |
Stage |
Problem or Need |
Tools and Repositories |
How CWM promotes better Data Warehouse utilization |
|
| Warehouse developers | All | Must view source, target, application descriptions (including interfaces). | Tools to facilitate development with ability to refer to information in metadata repository. | CWM includes containers for description at fine and coarse grain levels. | |
| End users | All | Must know • refresh state of inputs and outputs of queries, • mapping between models for transfer of data sets between tools, and • transformation rules. | Query and presentation tools | CWM presents models of metadata to be exploited by query and presentation tools. | |
| Information technology managers | All | Must have visibility into warehouse deployment state. | System management and report tools | CWM presents models of metadata to be exploited by system management and report tools. |