Several approaches have been proposed to model different aspects of a Data Warehouse (DW) during recent years, such as the modeling of a DW at the conceptual and logical level, the design of the ETL (Extraction, Transformation, Loading) processes, the derivation of the DW models from the enterprise data models, and customization of a DW schema. At the end of the design, a DW has to be deployed in a database environment, requiring many decisions of a physical nature. However, few efforts have

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... n dedicated to the modeling of the physical design of a DW from the early stages of a DW project. In this article, we argue that some physical decisions can be taken from gathering main user requirements. In this