A review of genomic data warehousing systems

To facilitate the integration and querying of genomics data, a number of generic data warehousing frameworks have been developed. They differ in their design and capabilities, as well as their intended audience. We provide a comprehensive and quantitative review of those genomic data warehousing frameworks in the context of large-scale systems biology. We reviewed in detail four genomic data warehouses (BioMart, BioXRT, InterMine and PathwayTools) freely available to the academic community. We quantified 20 aspects of the warehouses, covering the accuracy of their responses, their computational requirements and development efforts. Performance of the warehouses was evaluated under various hardware configurations to help laboratories optimize hardware expenses. Each aspect of the benchmark may be dynamically weighted by scientists using our online tool BenchDW (http://warehousebenchmark.fungalgenomics.ca/benchmark/) to build custom warehouse profiles and tailor our results to their specific needs.