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DW The Multipurpose Nature of The Data Warehouse

The document discusses the key characteristics that a data warehouse should have in order to effectively serve as an integration point for operational data and distribution point for business users. It should be enterprise focused to serve multiple departments and companies. It needs a resilient design that can accommodate new data elements without redesign. It must be able to load massive amounts of data quickly. And it should be well documented to allow easy data delivery and support a variety of business intelligence analyses.

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41 views3 pages

DW The Multipurpose Nature of The Data Warehouse

The document discusses the key characteristics that a data warehouse should have in order to effectively serve as an integration point for operational data and distribution point for business users. It should be enterprise focused to serve multiple departments and companies. It needs a resilient design that can accommodate new data elements without redesign. It must be able to load massive amounts of data quickly. And it should be well documented to allow easy data delivery and support a variety of business intelligence analyses.

Uploaded by

To MH
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Multipurpose Nature of the Data Warehouse

Hopefully by now, you have a good understanding of the role the data
warehouse plays in your BI environment. It not only serves as the integration
point
for your operational data, it must also serve as the distribution point of this
data into the hands of the various business users. If the data warehouse is to
act as a stable and permanent repository of historical data for use in your
strategic BI applications, it should have the following characteristics:
It should be enterprise focused. The data warehouse should be the starting
point for all data marts and analytical applications; thus, it will be used by
multiple departments, maybe even multiple companies or subdivisions.
A difficult but mandatory part of any data warehouse design team’s activities must be the resolution of conflicting data elements
and definitions. The
participation by the business community is also obligatory.
Its design should be as resilient to change as possible. Since the data
warehouse is used to store massive, detailed, strategic data over multiple
years, it is very undesirable to unload the data, redesign the database, and
then reload the data. To avoid this, you should think in terms of a processindependent, application-independent, and BI
technology-independent
data model. The goal is to create a data model that can easily accommodate
new data elements as they are discovered and needed without having to
redesign the existing data elements or data model.
It should be designed to load massive amounts of data in very short amounts
of time. The data warehouse database design must be created with a minimum of redundancy or duplicated attributes or entities.
Most databases
have bulk load utilities that include a range of features and functions that
can help optimize this process. These include parallelization options, loading data by block, and native application program
interfaces (APIs). They
may mean that you must turn off indexing, and they may require flat files.
However, it is important to note that a poorly or ineffectively designed database cannot be overcome even with the best load
utilities.
It should be designed for optimal data extraction processing
by the data
delivery programs. Remember that the ultimate goal for the
data warehouse is to feed the plethora of data marts that are then
used by the business community. Therefore, the data warehouse
must be well documented
so that data delivery teams can easily create their data delivery
programs.
The quality of the data, its lineage, any calculations or
derivations, and its
meaning should all be clearly documented.
Its data should be in a format that supports any and all
possible BI analyses in any and all technologies. It should
contain the least common
denominator level of detailed data in a format that supports all
manner of
BI technologies. And it must be designed without bias or any
particular
department’s utilization only in mind

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