I will be presenting the session “Data Warehouse Architecture” to the South Florida PASS chapter on Wednesday, Nov 14th, at 5:30PM CST. Below is the abstract. It will be a remote presentation that you can join online. Details at South … Continue reading →
I see a lot of confusion on what exactly is the difference between a data warehouse and a data mart. The best definition that I have heard of a data warehouse is: “A relational database schema which stores historical data … Continue reading →
I have previously blogged about Fast Track Data Warehouse, a reference configuration optimized for data warehousing (see Microsoft SQL Server Reference Architecture and Appliances). That was version 3.0 of the reference configuration that was for SQL Server 2008 R2. Just released … Continue reading →
To expand on what I talked about in SQL Server 2012 (“Denali”): Details on the next version of SSAS, there is a new data model called Tabular. So when you are creating a new project, which model should you use, Multidimensional … Continue reading →
NOTE: The subject of this blog was developed into a presentation that can be found at: Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture What is the best methodology to use when creating a data warehouse? Well, first off, let’s discuss some of … Continue reading →
While using a cube in SSAS is usually a great source for reporting, it is not always the best choice. Sometimes it is better to report off of the data warehouse that the cube is built from. For example, say … Continue reading →
When building a data warehouse, it is important that primary keys of dimension tables remain stable. To accomplish this, it is strongly recommended that surrogate keys be created and used for primary keys for all dimension tables instead of using … Continue reading →
If you’ve been working with databases for any length of time, you have heard the term normalization. Normalization is the process of efficiently organizing data in a database. There are two goals of the normalization process: eliminating redundant data (for … Continue reading →
ETL is the most common method used when transferring data from a source system to a data warehouse. But there are cases where you might want to use ELT. What is the difference between the two? Read on: Extract, Transform, … Continue reading →
If you are the decision maker in your company and you are tasked with purchasing one or more servers to be used solely for SQL Server and solely as a data warehouse, be aware there are options outside of the usual … Continue reading →
Microsoft has made available SQL Server appliances and reference architectures that allow customers to deploy data warehouse (DW), business intelligence (BI) and database consolidation solutions in a very short time, with all the components pre-configured and pre-optimized. These appliances include all the … Continue reading →
Source tables change over time. A data mart or data warehouse that is based on those tables needs to reflect these changes. This blog post will explain different solutions for solving this problem. When moving data into a data warehouse, taking … Continue reading →
A fantastic white paper just released: Microsoft EDW Architecture, Guidance and Deployment Best Practices. It’s a must read if you are a data architect, data developer, or DBA involved in an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). As the paper says, the … Continue reading →