Modeling and managing ETL processes

Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) tools are pieces of software responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, their cleansing, customization and insertion into a data warehouse. The design, development and deployment of ETL processes, which is currently, performed in an ad-hoc, in house fashion, needs modeling, design and methodological foundations. Unfortunately, the research community has a lot of work to do to confront this shortcoming. Our research explores a coherent framework for the conceptual, the logical, and the physical design of ETL processes. We delve into the modeling of ETL activities and provide a conceptual and a logical abstraction for the representation of these processes. Moreover, we focus on the optimization of the ETL processes, in order to minimize the execution time of an ETL process.