1 Data Warehouse Design for E-Commerce Environment Il-Yeol Song and Kelly LeVan-Shultz College of Information Science and Technology Drexel University Philadelphia, PA 19104 (Song, sg963pfa)@drexel.edu ABSTRACT Data warehousing and electronic-commerce are two of the most rapidly expanding fields in recent information technologies. In this paper, we discuss the design of data warehouses for e-commerce environment. We discuss requirement analysis, logical design, and physical design issues in e-commerce environments. We have collected an extensive set of interesting OLAP queries for e-commerce environments, and classified them into categories. Based on these OLAP queries, we illustrate our design with data warehouse bus architecture, dimension table structures, a base star schema, and an aggregation star schema. We finally present various physical design considerations for implementing the dimensional models. We believe that our collection of OLAP queries and dimensional models would be very useful in developing any real-world data warehouses in e-commerce environments. 1. Introduction In this paper, we discuss the design of data warehouses for the electronic-commerce (e-commerce) environment. Data warehousing and e-commerce are two of the most rapidly expanding fields in recent information technologies. “E-commerce provides for sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunication networks [Zwas96].” Forrester Research estimates that the e-commerce business in USA could reach to $327 billion by 2002 [Forr], and International Data Corp. estimates that at more than $400 billion [IDC]. Therefore, business analysis of e-commerce will become a compelling trend for competitive advantage. A data warehouse is an integrated data repository containing historical data of a corporation for supporting decision-making processes. A data warehouse provides a basis for online analytic processing and data mining for improving business intelligence by turning data into information and knowledge. Since technologies for e-commerce are being rapidly developed and e-businesses are rapidly expanding, analyzing e-business environments using data warehousing technology could enhance significant business intelligence. A well-designed data warehouse would feed business with the right information at the right time in order to make the right decisions in e- commerce environments. Designing a data warehouse is time-consuming. Pressures from business, both internal and external, are forcing data warehouse projects to show their usefulness to the business quickly. The data warehouse designers must be certain that the data warehouse