Data Warehousing Fundamentals for IT Professionals

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART 1 OVERVIEW AND CONCEPTS

1 THE COMPELLING NEED FOR DATA WAREHOUSING

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

ESCALATING NEED FOR STRATEGIC INFORMATION

The Information Crisis

Technology Trends

Opportunities and Risks

FAILURES OF PAST DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEMS

History of Decision-Support Systems

Inability to Provide Information

OPERATIONAL VERSUS DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Making the Wheels of Business Turn

Watching the Wheels of Business Turn

Different Scope, Different Purposes

DATA WAREHOUSING—THE ONLY VIABLE SOLUTION

A New Type of System Environment

Processing Requirements in the New Environment

Strategic Information from the Data Warehouse

DATA WAREHOUSE DEFINED

A Simple Concept for Information Delivery

An Environment, Not a Product

A Blend of Many Technologies

THE DATA WAREHOUSING MOVEMENT

Data Warehousing Milestones

Initial Challenges

EVOLUTION OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

BI: Two Environments

BI: Data Warehousing and Analytics

CHAPTER SUMMARY

REVIEW QUESTIONS

EXERCISES

2 DATA WAREHOUSE: THE BUILDING BLOCKS

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

DEFINING FEATURES

Subject-Oriented Data

Integrated Data

Time-Variant Data

Nonvolatile Data

Data Granularity

DATA WAREHOUSES AND DATA MARTS

How Are They Different?

Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Approach

A Practical Approach

ARCHITECTURAL TYPES

Centralized Data Warehouse

Independent Data Marts

Federated

Hub-and-Spoke

Data-Mart Bus

OVERVIEW OF THE COMPONENTS

Source Data Component

Data Staging Component

Data Storage Component

Information Delivery Component

Metadata Component ...