Data warehousing is about solving business problems,
so the first step is identifying the problem to be solved. At the very beginning, it??™s
important to determine the business problem to be solved and the information it
will take to provide a solution. In response to any problem, the question should be,
???What needs to be seen, and how does it need to be analyzed????
The what part of the question is usually a number of some sort. If there are quality
control issues, what needs to be seen are the number of items produced, the defect
rate, the cost to manufacture those items, and more. These numbers are called either
facts or measures (the terms are normally used interchangeably.) Therefore, what
ProClarity
PerformancePoint
Excel
Custom
Applications
Users access the data in the
warehouse
One or more cubes
are built using
Analysis Services
ETL process is performed,
pushing data into a relational
data warehouse
Data sources
are identified
Business decides
what problem to address
Cube
Integration
Services
Relational
Data
Warehouse
SQL
Oracle
Excel
XML
Figure 3-1 The overall process of building a data warehouse
34 B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e w i t h M i c r o s o f t O f f i c e P e r f o r m a n c e P o i n t S e r v e r 2 0 0 7
the user needs to see is what is called a fact in the data warehousing sense. This is of
great importance because the physical storage of information relies heavily on the
facts that are identified during the analysis of a project.
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