Lineage tracing for general data warehouse transformations

Data warehousing systems integrate information from operational data sources into a central repository to enable analysis and mining of the integrated information. During the integration process, source data typically undergoes a series of transformations, which may vary from simple algebraic operations or aggregations to complex “data cleansing” procedures. 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. We formally define the lineage tracing problem in the presence of general data warehouse transformations, and we present algorithms for lineage tracing in this environment. Our tracing procedures take advantage of known structure or properties of transformations when present, but also work in the absence of such information. Our results can be used as the basis for a lineage tracing tool in a general warehousing setting, and also can guide the design of data warehouses that enable efficient lineage tracing.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305, USA , , , , , , US

   Y. Cui & J. Widom

Edited by T. Özsu. Received: September 26, 2001 / Accepted: August 15, 2002 Published online: January 14, 2003

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-9811947 and IIS-9817799.

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