DATA WAREHOUSING FUNDAMENTALS: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Professionals

6.3. THE ARCHITECTURAL PLAN

You know that data warehouse architecture refers to the proper arrangement of the architectural components for maximum benefit. How do you plan your data warehouse architecture? Basically, every data warehouse is composed of pretty much the same components. Therefore, when you are planning the architecture, you are not inventing any new components to go into your particular warehouse. You are really sizing up each component for your environment. You are planning how all the components must be knit together so that they will work as an integrated system.

Before we proceed further, let us recap the major architectural components as discussed in Chapter 2:

• Source data

  Production data

  Internal data

  Archived data

  External data

• Data staging

  Data extraction

  Data transformation

  Data loading

• Data storage

• Information delivery

• Metadata

• Management and control

When you plan the overall architecture for your data warehouse, you will be setting the scope and contents of each of these components. For example, in your company all of the source data might fortunately reside on a single computing platform and also on a single relational database. If this were the case, then the data extraction component in the architecture would be substantially smaller and straightforward. Again, if your company decides on using just the facilities provided by the DBMS, such as alias definition and comments features, for metadata storage, then your metadata component would be simple.

Planning the ...