Supporting object and relational data in a data warehouse

Data warehouses with proven capabilities to deal with the massive amounts of information have already won the acceptance of many large organizations. This acceptance now is having users look for support of more complex data rather than just supporting data from legacy file systems and relational databases. While the incorporation of the object database technology has been one choice, the Object/Relational Database Management Systems (ORDBMSs), a blend of the Relational and Object technologies aimed at reaping the best of the both, is the preferred option. This paper presents a model for an ORDBMS based data warehouse. The model provides an infrastructure for the user to work with data represented in the form of classes, analyze it using tools, and also query the database at an abstract level. The model has been tested with a prototype using Oracle 8 in the backend and Java to build the analysis tools and user interface.