More Investment in Conceptual Designers: Think about it!

Developing database (DB) and data warehouse (DW) applications passes through three main modeling phases imposed by the ANSI/SPARC architecture: conceptual, logical and physical. This architecture creates two different actors: (i) conceptual designers and Database Administrators (DBA). The first actor collects user requirements, chooses the relevant diagrams for designing the conceptual model (or the logical model). The DBA ensures the performance, the maintenance and the tuning of the final application. Most of the tasks performed by these two actors are complex and time consuming for a majority of companies. Recently, some academic and industry research efforts are moving towards truly zero-administration of DW by proposing tools (advisors) substituting some tasks of DBA. One of the functionalities of these tools is to propose recommendations in choosing optimization structures such as indexing, materialized views, etc. They do not guarantee robust solutions. In this paper, we propose a revolutionary economical model for DB /DW application. Instead of substituting the DBA by advisors, we propose to delegate some DBA tasks to conceptual designers like selecting optimization structures. First, we propose to connect user requirements to the conceptual model of the target application. Secondly, based on the analysis of requirements, SQL queries are identified and then used to select optimization structures. Finally, a feasibility of our approach is tested through the selection of bitmap join indexes based on user requirements.