A formal approach to the design of distributed data warehouses

Data warehouses provide data for on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems, which deal with analytical tasks in businesses. As these tasks do not depend on the latest updates by transactions, the input from operational databases is separated from the outputs to dialogue interfaces for OLAP. In this paper a layered formal specification for data warehouses and OLAP systems using Abstract State Machines (ASMs) is presented. The approach explicitly exploits the fundamental idea of separating input from operational databases and output to OLAP systems. Then it will be shown how this specification can be extended to distributed data warehouses.