Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence
DOREEN’S PRESENTATION.
TOPICS COVERED
Building a DataWarehouse
Dimensional modelling/Analysis
Fact/Dimensio tables
Star schema
Snowflake, fact constellatio
Building a Data WareHouse
The data warehouse must handle large amounts of data, and must be simple to
query and understand by the end users
steps for building a data warehouse
Planning and Project Management
1. Key Issues
Values and Expectation
Risk Assessment
Top Down or Bottom Up
Build or Buy
Single Vendor or Best Of Breed
assess the value to be derived from the companys proposed data warehouse
be sure that, given the culture and the current requirements of your company, a data
warehouse is the most viable solution.
Some Questions to look at;
Will your data warehouse help the executives and managers to do better planning and make
better decisions?
Is it going to improve the bottom line?
Is it going to increase market share? If so, by how much?
What are the expectations?
What does the management want to accomplish through the data warehouse?
make a list of realistic benefits and expectations.
Risk Assessment
If the project fails, how much money will go down the drain?
Questions to consider when doing risk assesment
What are the risks faced by the company without the benefits derivable from a data
warehouse?
What losses are likely to be incurred?
What opportunities are likely to be missed?
Top-down or Bottom-up approaches
The top-down approach is to start at the enterprise- wide data warehouse, although
possibly build it iteratively.
Then data from the overall, large enterprise-wide data warehouse flows into departmental
and subject data marts.
first plan and define requirements at the overall corporate level.
Do you have the large resources needed to build a corporate-wide data warehouse first and
then deploy the individual data marts?
NB: This approach is time consuming, delays.
The bottom-up approach is to start by building individual data marts, one by one.
The conglomerate of these data marts will make up the enterprise data warehouse.
Build or Buy.
company’s data warehouse project must have the full support of the top management
right from day one.
The entire organization is involved and positioned for strategic advantage.
have a sponsor from the highest levels of management to keep the focus
Justifying Your Data Warehouse
Calculate the current technology costs to produce the applications and reports
supporting strategic decision making
Calculate the business value of the proposed data warehouse with the estimated dollar
values for profits, dividends, earnings growth, revenue growth, and market share
growth
Do the full-fledged exercise
DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS
In the phase of finding requirements, need to concentrate on what information the users
need not on how we are going to provide the required information
DIMENSIONAL MODELLING
Understandability.
Query performance
Extensibility.
Dimensional Models
Relational Model
Designed from the perspective of process efficiency
Marketing
Sales
“Normalised” data structures
Entity Relationship Model
Used for transactional, or operational systems
OLTP : OnLine Transaction Processing
Based on data that is
Current
Non Redundant
Dimensional Model
Designed from the perspective of subject
Sales
Customers
“De-normalised” data structures in blatant violation of normalisation
Used for analysis of aggregated data
OLAP : OnLine Analytical Processing
Based on data that is
Historical
May be redundant
ER vs. Dimensional Models