Data Warehousing Training

The main methodology for the Data Warehousing

Bottom-up approach

In the bottom-up approach data marts are first created to provide reporting and analytical capabilities for specific business processes. Though it is important to note that in Kimball methodology, the bottom-up process is the result of an initial business oriented Top-down analysis of the relevant business processes to be modelled.

Data marts contain, primarily, dimensions and facts. Facts can contain either atomic data and, if necessary, summarized data. The single data mart often models a specific business area such as "Sales" or "Production." These data marts can eventually be integrated to create a comprehensive data warehouse. The integration of data marts is managed through the implementation of what Kimball calls data warehouse bus architecture". The data warehouse bus architecture is primarily an implementation of "the bus" a collection of conformed dimensions, which are dimensions that are shared (in a specific way) between facts in two or more data marts.

The integration of the data marts in the data warehouse is centered on the conformed dimensions (residing in "the bus") that define the possible integration "points" between data marts. The actual integration of two or more data marts is then done by a process known as "Drill across". A drill-across works by grouping (summarizing) the data along the keys of the (shared) conformed dimensions of each fact participating in the "drill across" followed by a join on the keys of these grouped (summarized) facts.

Maintaining tight management over the data warehouse bus architecture is fundamental to maintaining the integrity of the data warehouse. The most important management task is making sure dimensions among data marts are consistent. In Kimball's words, this means that the dimensions "conform"

Top-down Design:

Subject-oriented

The data in the data warehouse is organized so that all the data elements relating to the same real-world event or object are linked together.

Non-volatile

Data in the data warehouse are never over-written or deleted — once committed, the data are static, read-only, and retained for future reporting.

Integrated

The data warehouse contains data from most or all of an organization's operational systems and these data are made consistent.

Time-variant

The top-down design methodology generates highly consistent dimensional views of data across data marts since all data marts are loaded from the centralized repository. Top-down design has also proven to be robust against business changes. Generating new dimensional data marts against the data stored in the data warehouse is a relatively simple task. The main disadvantage to the top-down methodology is that it represents a very large project with a very broad scope. The up-front cost for implementing a data warehouse using the top-down methodology is significant, and the duration of time from the start of project to the point that end users experience initial benefits can be substantial. In addition, the top-down methodology can be inflexible and unresponsive to changing departmental needs during the implementation phases

Hybrid Design

Data warehouse (DW) solutions often resemble hub and spoke architecture. Legacy systems feeding the DW/BI solution often include customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP), generating large amounts of data. To consolidate these various data models, and facilitate the extract transform load (ETL) process, DW solutions often make use of a operational data store (ODS). The information from ODS is then parsed into the actual DW. To reduce data redundancy, larger systems will often store the data in a normalized way. Data marts for specific reports can then be built on top of the DW solution.

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