Pentaho® Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL®

Chapter 8. The Data Mart Design Process

Chapters 6 and 7 introduced you to data warehousing, the available technology and the predominant modeling techniques used. These chapters laid a solid theoretical foundation you can build on once you actually start designing and creating your first real solutions. Now it's time to explain the steps needed to get these solutions in place. As we explained in Chapter 6, a data warehouse is a process, not a project. A process consists of more than just technology and especially in the case of a business intelligence solution, involving your end users in the process is essential for its success.

Before you can start building a data warehouse or the first data mart for the data warehouse, you need to know what you want to put into it. In most cases there is an existing demand for a solution that will deliver the insights and reports needed to better manage an organization. The first step in the design process is to identify these often latent demands and convert them into concrete requirements for the business intelligence solution. With the requirements identified, you can begin to design and build a data warehousing solution that can meet those demands that provide your organization with real value.

Requirements Analysis

The starting point of any data warehouse project is to clearly define the requirements from a business point of view. How much data will be coming in to the organization, from what sources, and in what condition? What kind of information, ...