Philosophy BIReady Currently most data warehouses are created and maintained 'by hand'. The design of Data Warehouses and Datamarts are based on the business needs. Currently, this is mostly carried out by a (team of) specialized consultants. After that, the ETL processes are developed, most often with the help of a specialized tool. When database structure or processing changes are required it takes a significant maintenance effort to modify the existing database structure and ETL processes. Many processes for creating a data warehouse are more or less the same. This implies that a generic solution must be possible. In other words: a data warehouse can be generated based on metadata describing the business model . Sometimes the business model already exists (e.g. in a casetool), this is the most convenient case for working with BIReady. More often this is not the case: then a core source system, which reflects the business most closely, can be used as input for the metadata (of course, fine tuning will be necessary). Otherwise the business model must be generated 'from scratch'. Additional information that is required consists of the history treatment of attributes and the mappings from the sources to the business model. BIReady stores this metadata in a repository from which the data warehouse and accompanying data marts will be generated and maintained. Since BIReady knows the structure of the source system(s), the data warehouse and the user input on mappings, it can also generate the process instructions for the ETL-like processes. The same goes for the population of the data marts.