Abstract

Data warehouse, as the foundation of decision support system, is critical for the managers to make decisions. It is different with operational database. Data warehouse reads data from multiple operational databases instead of getting the data from the end user transaction input. In a warehousing environment, the data lineage problem is that of tracing warehouse data items back to the original source items from which they were derived. Enabling lineage tracing in a data warehouse environment has several benefits and applications, including in-depth data analysis and data mining, authorization management, efficient warehouse recovery, etc. In this report, we firstly introduce the basic concept and architecture of data warehouse, as well as the development tools and methods about data warehouse. Secondly, we discuss the lineage tracing problems and challenges in the data warehousing system, and then use an example to present the algorithms and procedure of lineage tracing. As well, we will present our design and implementation of a prototype system called LTI, to demonstrate the lineage tracing procedures using an inventory system as a data warehouse system. We also developed various graphical user interfaces required to facilitate interacting with the system in order to update the source databases in the LTI system. Finally, we will show the experimentation of using our LTI system through tracing inventory and sales order data in the data warehouse system