Flexible and efficient Data warehousing solutions: Part 1th: Customer Interaction and project planning

Brief introduction

Business Intelligence (Business Intelligence) has evolved to include more and more data analysis techniques. No matter which data analysis method is used, the Data warehouse is still the important foundation of utilizing information assets. This series of articles will help you deliver a data warehouse infrastructure using IBM DB2 data Warehouse Edition (DB2 DWE), which is critical to on-demand business intelligence. This article will focus on the Data Warehouse plan, which includes customer interaction processes, business discovery, project proposals, and project plans.

Target Audience

This article is written for IT professionals who need to know how to deliver a data warehouse solution. This article assumes that you are already familiar with the concepts of systems and databases. Many topics are not covered in this article, but they are also the basis for delivering good data warehouse solutions, including system and database design, management, and performance tuning. This article focuses only on issues closely related to the Data warehouse.

What is business intelligence?

Business Intelligence (Business INTELLIGENCE,BI) is the collection and analysis of large amounts of data to gain insight into how to drive strategic and strategic business decisions. BI is a collection of processes and technologies that are used to transform data into information. It includes a wide variety of technologies, including data warehousing, multidimensional analysis or online analytical processing (OLAP), data Mining and data visualization, as well as simple queries and a wide variety of analytical tools for making reports. These technologies allow business users to collect, store, access, and analyze data to improve their ability to make business decisions.

Figure 1. What is business intelligence?

What is a data warehouse?

The Data Warehouse (warehouse) is a centralized repository (repository) that contains comprehensive, detailed data and profile data to provide a complete view of customers, vendors, business processes, and transactions from a historically variable historical perspective.

Data marts, on the other hand, contain a subset of the data stored in the data warehouse that is of interest to a particular business community, department, or user group (for example, marketing promotions, financial or Account collections). Mart

It is important to realize that data marts are defined by their user's capabilities rather than the size of the data mart database. In a well structured BI system, the Data Warehouse acts as a source for multiple data marts.

What is a data warehouse?

Data warehousing (warehousing) is the design and implementation of processes and tools for managing and delivering complete, timely, accurate, and understandable information for decision making. It includes all activities that enable an enterprise to create, manage, and maintain a data warehouse or data mart. Data warehousing (warehousing) processes the management of the development, implementation, and operation of a data warehouse or data warehouse. It includes metadata management, data acquisition, cleansing, data integration, memory management, data distribution, data archiving, Operation report making, analysis report making, security management, backup and recovery plans, and more.

The following subsections provide an introduction to the Data Warehouse (in addition to report making and analysis). Special attention will be paid to preparing data for analysis-a task that typically accounts for 80% of the most Data Warehouse project plans.

Why did you choose IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition?

IBM DB2 DWE is a powerful and complete business intelligence (Business Intelligence) infrastructure product that includes DB2, integrated OLAP, advanced data Mining, data extraction, transformation, and loading (extraction, Transformation and Loading,etl), report making tools, etc. DB2 DWE manipulates and enhances the performance of advanced desktop OLAP tools such as DB2 OLAP Server and IBM partners.

DB2 DWE is one of the most cost-effective data warehousing tools. According to a 2004 study by Market Magic Ltd. (see Resources), the probable cost of ownership™ (PCO) implemented for the data warehouse in more than 5 years DB2 DWE is lower than Oracle and NCR Terad of ATA.

Predictable scalability and no limits are key criteria for a business intelligence (Business Intelligence) platform. DB2 meets this requirement through its unique implementation of a shared-no (shared-nothing) architecture. Scalability applies to both large and small databases.

Scalability and price are important, but they cannot solve the challenge of building the BI platform alone. DB2 DWE the blueprint through the same delivery of critical analysis and mining techniques. DB2 with the DB2 Cube views for OLAP applications, the intelligent Miner scoring for real-time data mining in the database, and new applications such as the Space Extender (spatial DB2) and XML queries that are deeply embedded in extender Tools are fully integrated to ensure seamless integration and optimized performance.