Deciding the Physical Implementation of ETL Workflows

This paper deals with the problem of determining the best possible physical implementation of an ETL workflow, given its logical-level description and an appropriate cost model as inputs. The paper formulates the problem as a state-space problem and provides a suitable solution for this task. The paper further extends this technique by intentionally introducing sorter activities in the workflow in order to search for alternative physical implementations with lower cost. The paper experimentally assesses the method based on a principled organization of test suites.