Agent Based Data Storage and Distribution in Data Warehouses

The data warehouse (DWH) is usually presented as a centralized database. In this paper, we propose a new approach to manage data storage and distribution in a data warehouse environment. This approach deals with the dynamic data distribution of the DWH on a set of servers. The data distribution that we consider is different from the “classical” one which depends on the data use. The distribution in our approach consists in distributing data when the server reaches its storage capacity limit. This distribution assures the scalability and exploits the storage and processing resources available in the organization using the data warehouse. It is worth noting that our approach is based on a multi-agent model mixed with the scalability distribution proposed by the Scalable Distributed Data Structures. The proposed multi-agent model is composed of stationary agent classes: Client, Dispatcher, Domain and Server, and a mobile agent class called Messenger. These agents collaborate and interact to achieve automatically the storage, the splitting (distribution), the redirection and the access operations on the distributed data warehouse. In this paper, we demonstrate the improvements obtained when we have used the multi-agent system and the Messenger agents in the data storage operation.