August 2009 I came across an article called "A comparison of data warehousing methodologies" by Arun Sen, Atish P. Sinha printed in the Communications of the ACM Vol. 48 No. 3. that discusses various data warehouse architectures and methodologies. If you are not familiar with ACM, it is one of my favorite vendor-neutral technical resources that includes ElementK online technical and soft skill courses, Books 24x7/Safari IT online books, and a wealth of other technical publications. Although the article focused on comparing methodologies, it included a great side-by-side visual shown below that illustrates the common data warehouse architectural implementations and where the data and metadata actually "live" within the various designs. Keep in mind that the underlying database warehouse technology, Teradata, Oracle, Microsoft etc., can influence selection of the most appropriate architecture design, data warehousing methodology all the way down to choosing normalized or dimensional table designs. For more information on choosing a data warehousing architecture, check out TDWI's article, Inmon's Building the Data Warehouse and Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit books. Source Communications of the ACM Vol 48 No 3