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

Chapter 5. Example Business Case: World Class Movies

The examples in the remainder of this book are based on a fictitious company named World Class Movies (WCM). WCM is an online retail firm offering both movie sales and rentals; this combination sets the company apart from online retailers such as Amazon that only sell items, and companies such as Netflix, where movies can only be rented or viewed online.

Why did we choose an online movie store? First, it's an example that most people can easily relate to: we love movies, we read about new movies, we follow "news" about the actors that star in the movies, and watch movie review programs on television. And, of course, we're all familiar with ordering all kinds of stuff off the web. Second, the technical benefit of using an online retail example is that all transactions can be tied to a named or identified customer, so we can avoid the challenges presented by ordinary outlet sales selling items to anonymous clients. Finally, a reasonable amount of data is needed to illustrate some of the concepts related to data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics. This means we need many customers, many individual products, and a lot of transactions, which coincides wonderfully with the chosen example.

Note

An example like this can never cover all the intricacies of a real company or organization, so be prepared to run into several other types of departments and business processes in the real world. Departments such as finance, production, ...