The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

16.3. System Interconnection

There are three additional areas where the DW/BI system interconnects with other systems in interesting ways. The first is with what we call downstream systems: other systems, either transactional or analytical, that pull some of their source data from the data warehouse. The second is a source system that manages what we call master data. Master data management is a system designed to be the single source for certain core business objects, like Customer or Product. It's the transaction version of conformed dimensions. The third is BI web services, where the DW/BI system offers some of its unique capabilities to other systems via web services. Let's look at downstream systems first.

16.3.1. Downstream Systems

If the DW/BI team does its job well, people will learn to trust the numbers that come out of the data warehouse and it will gradually become the analytical system of record. As a result, other systems will want to use data from the data warehouse rather than try to recreate it themselves. For example, the sales force automation system might want to pull detailed customer data from the warehouse for distribution to remote salespeople. Another example we've seen is the customer care system querying the warehouse to pull customer order history when a service rep needs to respond to a question about an item the customer ordered two years ago. The DW/BI team also needs to make sure it can supply any value-added elements that get created in the warehouse ...