Building the Data Warehouse

Chapter 19. Data Warehouse Design Review Checklist

One of the most effective techniques for ensuring quality in the operational environment is the design review. Through a design review, errors can be detected and resolved prior to coding. The cost benefit of identifying errors early in the development life cycle is enormous.

In the operational environment, a design review is usually done on completion of the physical design of an application. The types of issues around which an operational design review centers are the following:

• Transaction performance

• Batch window adequacy

• System availability

• Capacity

• Project readiness

• User requirements satisfaction

Done properly in the operational environment, a design review can save significant resources and greatly increase user satisfaction. Most importantly, when a design review has been properly executed, major pieces of code do not have to be torn up and rewritten after the system has gone into production.

A design review is as applicable to the data warehouse environment as it is to the operational environment, with a few provisos.

One proviso is that systems are developed in the data warehouse environment in an iterative manner, where the requirements are discovered as a part of the development process. The classical operational environment is built under the well-defined system development life cycle (SDLC). Systems in the data warehouse environment are not built under the SDLC. Other differences between the development process in the operational ...