ORGANISATIONAL DATA WAREHOUSE:AN EVALUATION OF TESTING TECHNIQUE

Abstract

This article is a position paper on the nature of the data warehouse exhaustive testing of a Data warehouse during its design on an ongoing basis for the incremental activities comprises data warehouse testing. This type of testing is getting common today. The reasons for this are manifold, prominent ones being increase in Enterprise Mergers & Acquisitions, Data Center Migrations, Increased Compliance regulations, Senior Management's increased focus on data and data driven decision makings. The paper focuses on different components in the Data warehouse architecture, its design and aligning the test strategy accordingly. The main components include the ETL process, OLAP engine and other client applications residing on the data warehouse. Data Storage has become cheaper and easier compared to the file-storage days. Hardware has become cheaper and Data Mining solutions are easily available. Data driven decision have proved to be more accurate. In this context, testing the Data warehouse implementations are also of utmost significance. Organization decisions depend entirely on the Enterprise data and the data has to be of utmost quality! Complex Business rules and transformation logic implementations mandates a diligent and thorough testing. Finally, the paper addresses some challenges for DWH Testing like voluminous data, heterogeneous sources, temporal inconsistency and estimation challenges.