THE INCREMENTAL APPROACH

There are two main approaches to building a data warehouse. The first is to take the traditional waterfall-type route that was touched upon briefly in Chapter 1. The idea is that we gather the user requirements, using a standard methodology, then we go away and build the warehouse and, when it is complete, we deliver it to the users and move on to our next project.

The shortcomings of this technique are well-known, and there are special problems that occur in data warehouse projects where the waterfall approach is used. This is discussed in the next chapter.

The second approach is more akin to rapid application developments (RAD) and involves piecemeal development. In data warehousing, this approach is often referred ...

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