SAMSTAR: An Automatic Tool for Generating Star Schema from an Entity-Relationship Diagram

by the joint work of
College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA19104, U.S.A.; and

College of Information Technology, Kangwon National University
Chuncheon, Kangwon 200-701, Korea

Welcome to SAMSTAR world !!!

The SAMSTAR is a tool generating automatically star schemas for data warehouses from ER diagrams for OLTP databases.

This tool takes an ERD drawn by ERwin Data Modeler as an input, which is stored in the XML file format, then it generates (multiple) star schema automatically. Users can control the number of star schema generated from an ERD by specifying a threshold value.

The following figure shows an overall architecture of the SAMSTAR system.

In order to experience the SAMSTAR system from this website, just give an ERD for your own application and set a threshold value. Then you will get star schema which we recommend for building your data warehouses.

If you didn't prepare your own ERD yet, some examples are in the below. Please click the following links by the mouse right button and download these example ERDs.

• Product Sales Example in [1] / download(XML) / view ERD(PDF)
  (Give the threshold = 1.8 or 1.5)
• Company Database Example in [2] / download(XML) / view ERD(PDF)
  (Give the threshold = 1.5)
• Hospital Database Example in [3] / download(XML) / view ERD(PDF)
  (Give the threshold = 1.8 or 1.5)
• Sales Database Example in [4] / download(XML) / view ERD(PDF)
  (Give the threshold = 1.5)
• eMovie Rental Example in [5] / download(XML) / view ERD(PDF)
  (Give the threshold = 1.5)

Running the SAMSTAR system

(In order to run this SAMSTAR system, the Java Runtime Environment(JRE) should have been installed in your computer. If it is not intalled yet, please click HERE to download/install the JRE for MS Windows.)

Note: Users can control the SAMSTAR system by a threshold value which is a condition selecting fact table(s). If you don't get any star schema as output, please give smaller number for the threshold. The smaller number you give, the more fact tables you will get.

References

1. Moody, D. L., Kortink, M. A. R.: From Enterprise Models to Dimensional Models: A Methodology for Data Warehouse and Data Mart Design. In the Proc. of 2nd International Workshop on Design and Management of Data Warehouses, pp. 5, Stockholm (2000).
2. Elmasri, R., Navathe, S. B.: Fundamentals of Database Systems, 5th ed., Pearson Education, Inc. (2007)
3. Golfarelli, M., Maio, D., and Rizzi, S. : Conceptual Design of Date Warehouses from E/R Schemes. In the Proc. of 31st International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-31), Vol.7, pp. 334-343, Hawaii (1998).
4. Golfarelli, M., Maio, D., and Rizzi, S. : Dimensional Fact Model: A Conceptual Model for Data Warehouse. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS), V.7, N. 2 & 3, pp. 215-247, (1998).
5. Computer Associates, eMovie rental sample ERD in ERwin Data Modeler.
6. Song, I.-Y, Khare, R., and Dai, B. : SAMSTAR: A Semi-automated Lexical Method for Generating Star Schemas from an Entity-Relationship Diagram. In the Proc. of ACM 10th International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2007), pp.9-16, Lisbon, Portugal, 2007.
7. Song, I.-Y. et al.: SAMSTAR: An Automatic Tool for Generating Star Schema from an Entity-Relationship Diagram. In the Proc. of 27th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER2008), pp.522-523, Barcelona, Spain, 2008.

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If you have any questions or comments, please send e-mails to Prof. Jinho Kim or Prof. Il-Yeol Song