Current trends in data warehousing methods and technologies

Data Warehousing (DW) methods and technologies are in a new stage of their evolution and of their amalgamation with the enterprise businesses, they serve. The main goals of this work are to identify, review and analyze the latest trends in DW. A systematic approach is followed to recognize, define and analyze the most important trends. The approach is based on the trends' corresponding role and value in the business processes and intelligence (BI). For this purpose we start with updated definitions of DW and BI and then consider the generalized Architecture of today's DW. We then "drill down" to analyze the DW problems and trends in their solving for data quality provisions, regulatory compliance, infrastructure consolidation, and standardization, corporate performance optimization and metadata management. This in-depth logical analyzing approach results in comprehensible conclusions to be considered on the important early phases of DW projects, as it is well known that early project decisions carry impacts for the whole DW system life span.