Challenges and Conflicts Integrating Heterogeneous Data Warehouses

This paper addresses several challenges, which appear when possibly heterogeneous data warehouses, are integrated. Such a scenario may show up in the environment of a merger of two companies. These companies need to combine their data to attain 'one single version of truth' for decisions beyond organizational borders. The issues are depicted and analyzed from an exemplary and theoretical point of view. Not only weaknesses, but also reasons for those shortcomings are analyzed. The introduction follows a section of related work, which basically aims for a better classification of the thereafter named approaches. In the following sections schema and mapping conflicts are discussed. The fifth section targets the detection of organizational deficits, which are probably a facilitator for those problems. Moreover path breaking decisions within a data warehouse integration project are visualized, to provide decision makers with some rough reference points.