CAWE DW Documenter: A Model-Driven Tool for Customizable ETL Documentation Generation

Within business intelligence systems (BI systems), ETL (extract, transform and load) processes move numerous data from heterogeneous sources to a data warehouse and become more complex with growing enterprise size. To keep costs and expenditure of time for maintenance and evolution of those systems slight, ETL processes should be documented. A well-documented system also leads to higher transparency regarding the origin and processing of data, which increases the system’s acceptance by business users. However, the preparation of high quality software documentation is sophisticated and therefore it usually only takes place in the design or development phase of BI systems. To ensure that the documentation is always updated, automated generation is advantageous. The paper at hand presents the research prototype CAWE DW Documenter for automated configurable ETL documentation generation.