Review and exploration of metadata management in data warehouse

With the rapid development of information technology, how to extract and retrieve required information from a large amount of data has become an important issue that managers and policymakers concern. As a kind of structured data environment based on data management, data warehouse shows its advantage in analysis and decision-making. It can provide current and historical data for decision support, which is hardly obtained in traditional operational database. In the construction of data warehouse system, metadata and its management are of great importance to make the system more effective. In this paper, a brief history of data management´s development from database to data warehouse is presented. Metadata and its management are introduced from several aspects, i.e. definition, structure, and influence. The typical framework and construction of metadata management system are concluded to give some guidances for enterprises. At last, the prospect of metadata management in data warehouse systems is discussed.