It is important to realize that
building a data warehouse is not an easy task and many decisions must be made,
some of which involve tradeoffs.
The overall flow of building a warehouse is generally described as shown in
Figure 3-1. You can see that the data is located in its source systems, migrated into
a relational data warehouse, and then turned into cubes for consumption by end user
tools. Each part of this process contains complexities and subtleties that can greatly
affect the usability and ultimate acceptance of the warehouse by business users. It
is therefore critical that these pieces be taken seriously and that proper planning be
done in each phase. The first phase will encompass several aspects of the system
design and will lay the foundation for all the analysis that will be performed.
C h a p t e r 3 : D a t a W a r e h o u s i n g a n d B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e 33
Designing to Solve the Problem
An old joke in economics says that if you can teach a parrot to say, ???Supply and
demand,??? you??™ve created an economist. The fact that economists consider this joke
even remotely funny helps explain why economics is called ???The Dismal Science,???
but it strikes close to home; if you could teach that parrot to say, ???Facts and
dimensions,??? you??™d have a data warehousing guru.
Perhaps simply saying, ???Facts and dimensions,??? isn??™t enough to make someone a
data warehousing guru, but those two words flow through everything that is done in
the data warehousing arena.
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