Building a real data warehouse for market research

This paper reflects the results of the evaluation phase of building a data production system for the retail research division of the GfK, Europe's largest market research company. The application specific requirements like end-user needs or data volume are very different from data warehouses discussed in the literature, making it a real data warehouse. In a case study, these requirements are compared with state-of-the-art solutions offered by leading software vendors. Each of the common architectures (MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP) was represented by a product. The result of this comparison is that all systems have to be massively tailored to GfK's needs, especially to cope with meta data management or the maintenance of aggregations.