Description:
Data warehouses store millions of records, allowing managers to ask the big-picture questions about their businesses. The authors of Data Warehouse Design Solutions share their expertise in designing successful data warehouses and concentrate on understanding business processes within a variety of industries. First, the authors outline the promise--and potential hurdles--of data warehousing. They thoroughly explain the idea of dimensional data, which is used to represent the quantities or attributes that can be queried in a data warehouse. The authors argue that data warehouses need to adapt to changing business conditions and often must be more flexible than planned. They advise building the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) as a series of interlocking data marts (which contain different dimensions). Developers can build part of a solution and add new data marts later. The result is a more adaptable approach to warehousing data. The heart of Data Warehouse Design Solutions is the descriptions of data warehouses tailored to specific industries--sales, marketing, fulfillment, production, inventory, and capacity--using real-world businesses. The authors offer business models, sample dimensions, database schema, and sample reports for each business area. Later chapters discuss more advanced areas for data warehousing, including budget tracking, financial reporting (and managerial accounting), and even how to look at profitability and intellectual capital. The authors round out their nuts-and-bolts tour of today's businesses with a summary of the various measures that fit each type of organization. Finally, the authors come back to theory, with some ideas on building effective systems that are fast and that generate easy-to-read reports. The last chapter argues convincingly that their incremental approach to building data warehousing has some distinct advantages. --Richard Dragan
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