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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