Comparing the understandability of alternative data warehouse schemas: An empirical study

An easily understood data warehouse model enables users to better identify and retrieve its data. It also makes it easier for users to suggest changes to its structure and content. Through an exploratory, empirical study, we compared the understandability of the star and traditional relational schemas. The results of our experiment contradict previous findings and show schema type did not lead to significant performance differences for a content identification task. Further, the relational schema actually led to slightly better results for a schema augmentation task. We discuss the implications of these findings for data warehouse design and future research.

Research highlights
► An experiment compared the understandability of the star schema to the relational schema.
► The findings contradict the conventional wisdom that the star schema is easier to understand.
► Subjects identified content in a relational schema as effectively as those given a star schema.
► Subjects given the relational schema performed slightly better on a schema augmentation task.