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Understanding Data Warehouse design
At a very global level, construction of
data warehouse is a business project by itself. The enterprise needs to ask itself certain fundamental questions before actually launching on
process of designing
data warehouse. It must begin with a conviction that a data warehouse would really help its business and
return on investment will make it worth it.
The general questions that are asked may be as below….
Do we need a data warehouse? How will it help
business? What will it mean in terms of cost? What are
current data analysis methodologies being adopted? In what way are they deficient? Will setting up
data warehouse help in reducing these deficiencies? What kind of reporting and analysis do we really want? What is that we are getting now? Will such data analysis make
business more efficient? Will it help
business improve its services and customer relations? Once
replies to
above questions have been asked,
organization needs to examine other very crucial issues that will determine
wrap and hoof of
data warehouse that is being set up.
What are
kinds of data that are being generated by
enterprise? What kinds of data storage technologies are currently being used to backup and store historical data? What other external sources of information do we need to tap to make
data in
data warehouse meaningful for analysis? What kind of hardware and software will be required to set up this data warehouse? Who will be
personnel to handle
process of creating
data warehouse? Which departments will benefit from
data being created? Will
data warehouse be scaleable? How will it connect to
different data sources for data? How will we ensure that quality data is generated? What kinds of tools will be deployed to support end user needs for reports and analytics? The answers that emerge from these questions will be a set of business requirements. These requirements will determine
kind of data warehouse that will be ultimately set up in
enterprise. The first steps would be to define
global parameters that will shape
design of
data warehouse. The design can be a top down approach as recommended by Bill Inmon or a bottom up approach recommended by Ralph Kimball. It can be a combination of
two called
Hybrid approach or it can be a federated approach. Let us have a brief look at what these different approaches mean.
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