The WHIPS prototype for data warehouse creation and maintenance

Summary form only given. The goal of the Whips project (WareHousing Information Project at Stanford) is to develop algorithms and tools for the creation and maintenance of a data warehouse (J. Wiener et al., 1996). In particular, we have developed an architecture and implemented a prototype for identifying data changes at distributed heterogeneous sources, transforming them and summarizing them in accordance with warehouse specifications, and incrementally integrating them into the warehouse. In effect, the warehouse stores materialized views of the source data. The Whips architecture is designed specifically to fulfil several important and interrelated goals: sources and warehouse views can be added and removed dynamically; it is scalable by adding more internal modules; changes at the sources are detected automatically; the warehouse may be updated continuously as the sources change, without requiring down time; and the warehouse is always kept consistent with the source data by the integration algorithms. The Whips system is composed of many distinct modules that potentially reside on different machines. Each module is implemented as a CORBA object. They communicate with each other using ILU, a COBRA compliant object library developed by Xerox PARC.