The Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Glossary

 
The Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Glossary
I have collected and compiled this from a very nice website.Some of the terms are relating to Microsoft’s tool (Microsoft’s Analysis Services ) but that can be generalised to other non-microsoft tools also.
Link >>
Agent
An application that searches the data and sends an alert when a particular pattern is found.
 
Aggregations
Information […]

create JAVA_HOME quickly on Windows (Windows XP )

create JAVA_HOME quickly with following steps on Windows XP (Home Basic)
The goal is to create a new variable called JAVA_HOME in Windows Operating system,so get access to System Properties window and create new variable called ‘JAVA_HOME’ and insert value where your BIN folder of JDK within your system.
more detailed steps as below.
1)Right Click on “computer”
2)Select […]

Benefits of data warehousing

Benefits of data warehousing
Some of the benefits that a data warehouse provides are as follows:

A data warehouse provides a common data model for all data of interest, regardless of the data’s source. This makes it easier to report and analyze information than it would be if multiple data models from disparate sources were used to […]

what is Repository ?

Repository is a place where data are stored and maintained. A repository can be

a place where data is stored
a place where specifically digital data are stored
a site where eprints are located
a place where multiple databases or files are located for distribution over a network,
a computer location that is directly accessible to the user without […]

Metadata

Metadata (singular: metadatum) (sometimes called Metainformation) is “data about data”, of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items.
Metadata (sometimes written ‘meta data’) are used to facilitate the understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data. The metadata […]

How to find a column in database

How to find a column in database
Once, at a client site I was asked to do a drill through report from Purchasing to Fixed Assets. I don’t remember the exact details but it had something to do with Purchase orders. I knew little bit about Oracle Purchasing but had not worked enough on Fixed Assets. […]

Incremental Enhancements

Incremental Enhancements
After the system is up and running in the Production environment,there are situations where small and minor changes arises.(Incremental Enhancements).The task can be as simple as to do the changes in the production environment,but is highly risky to do on live (production)systems.Do the chnagses on the Developmetn and roll out the changes in the […]

Life cycle of a DW ( Data Warehouse ) project

Development life cycle of a DW ( Data Warehouse ) project.
The DW project follows following different stages.
1. Requirement Gathering
2. Physical Environment Setup
3. Data Modeling
4. ETL
5. OLAP Cube Design
6. Front End Development (Reports )
7. Performance Tuning
8. Quality Assurance
9. Rollout To Production
10. Production Maintenance
11. Incremental Enhancements

google.load(”visualization”, […]

Production Maintenance

Production Maintenance

After the DW project goes live activities like taking backup on regular time period and mangaging crisis becomes very important and needs to be planned well in advance.
The other task is to monitor the Users and to know how much they utilize the DW; so future enhancements can be planned.
Next >> Incremental Enhancements

[…]

Rollout To Production

Rollout To Production
After the QA team completes the testing ,they will give thumbs up(signoff document) to go to Production servers. It will take less then a week to go to live once everything is tested and approved.

Deliverables
· Delivery of the data warehousing system to the end users.
Next >> Production Maintenance

[…]

Quality Assurance

Quality AssuranceThis phase is shown in the form of flowchart of the process of QA to Production. Once the DW team completes the development work, the QA team which is from the Client side starts doing testing and the reports.
If there is any changes to be done, the Development team will work on the CR […]

Performance Tuning -ETL - Query Processing -Report Delivery

Performance Tuning
The Performance tuning of 3 areas to look for are as below. These tasks can easily take around a week.
1) ETL - Since Loading data is very time consuming ,its best to put that activity in a night load job.The ETL process needs to be tuned more and more as possible,since some problems are […]

Front End Development (Reports ) -Reporting tool

Front End Development of Reports
In this phase of DW project if the reports are not bringing any value to the end user or executive, then the efforts to build the OLAP cube is wasted. so its very important to think about the end reports and timely delivery of reports to the end user. It is […]

ETL - Extraction ,Transformation and Loading

ETL ( Extraction ,Transformation and Loading )
This phase of ETL ( Extraction ,Transformation and Loading ) takes the most of any Datawarehousing project.

This phase has to get the source data and following:
· Understand the Business Rules
· Understand the necessary Columns of tables.
· Understand the Logical data model
· Understand the Physical data model

The Developer has to […]

Physical Environment Setup -Development servers- Testing Servers - Production server

Physical Environment Setup

After the Requirements are gathered, its necessary to set physical Envioronment by installing database and maintaining the Physical servers.The usual set of servers include 3 sets of instances.

Development servers: where the developers work on the database and roll it for testing.
Testing Servers: the objects developed by the developers are tested on this server […]

Requirement Gathering in Data warehouse Project

Requirement Gathering
Requirements Gathering is started by directly discussing or with JAD sessions (Joint Application Development) with the End users .The help of Business leader or Business managers is required for this meeting and department co-operation is needed since individual departments will need to share their part of information.

The goal of this discussion is to identify […]

Data Modeling -Logical data model -Physical data model

Data Modeling
Data modeling is the process of identifying the data sources.Its observed that many a times this step is often delayed.

The data identification step is important and is better to be done by an experienced person and in this phase, else it might become tough to solve it in the later stages,until the ETL process.It […]

Differences Between Oracle Discoverer 4 Desktop Edition and Discoverer 4i Plus

Discoverer Plus is intended as a web version of Discoverer Desktop.
Advantage of Discoverer Plus :Plus offers the benefit of enabling access via a web browser instead of installing Discoverer Desktop on each
user’s PC.
Features currently in Discoverer Desktop 4.1 BUT not available in Discoverer 4i Plus.
Query Building Subqueries Find in Item Navigator
Reporting […]