DATA WAREHOUSING FUNDAMENTALS: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Professionals

8.8. EXERCISES

1. Match the columns:

   operational infrastructure preemptive multitasking shared disk MPP SMP interquery parallelization intraquery parallelization NUMA UNIX-based system data staging area

   shared-nothing architecture provides high concurrency single memory address space operating system feature vertical parallelism people, procedures, training easy administration choice data warehouse platform optimize for data transformation data movement option

2. In your company, all the source systems reside on a single UNIX-based platform, except one legacy system on a mainframe computer. Analyze the platform options for your data warehouse. Would you consider the single-platform option? If so, why? If not, why not?

3. You are the manager for the data warehouse project ofa nationwide car rental company. Your data warehouse is expected to start out in the 500 GB range. Examine the options for server hardware and write a justification for choosing one.

4. As the administrator of the proposed data warehouse for a hotel chain with a leading presence in ten eastern states, write a proposal describing the criteria you will use to select the RDBMS for your data warehouse. Make your assumptions clear.

5. You are the Senior Analyst responsible for the tools in the data warehouse ofa large local bank with branches in only one state. Make a list of the types of tools you will provide for use in your data warehouse. Include tools for developers and users. Describe the features you will be looking for in each tool type.