Towards comprehensive requirement analysis for data warehouses: considering security requirements

Abstract

Data warehouse (DW) systems integrate data from heterogeneous sources and are used by decision makers to analyze the status and the development of an organization. Traditionally, requirement analysis approaches for DWs have focused purely on information needs of decision makers, without considering other kinds of requirements such as security or performance. But modeling these issues in the early stages of the development is a cornerstone for building a DW that satisfies user expectations. In this paper, we define the two kinds of requirements for data warehousing as information and quality-of-service requirements and combine them in a comprehensive approach based on MDA (model driven architecture). This allows a separation of concerns to model requirements without losing the connection between information and quality-of-service, also in the following conceptual or logical design stages. Finally, in this paper, we introduce a security requirement model for data warehousing, and a three-step process for modeling security requirements, thus illustrating the applicability of our approach with an example.