Determining Needs
Is a data warehouse appropriate for your business?
Is a data warehouse the appropriate solution to meet the client need or would a reporting repository with specific operation requirements be a more appropriate solution?
It is important to gain a full understanding from the client of the outcome of any exercise pertaining to the storage and re-use of data for management reporting.
Does each outcome require input from various sources of data?
A simple set of examples would be:
- A report on how many Term Deposits with balances over $1,000 are held in a certain location. (Term Deposits database)
- A report on how many saving bank deposits are made every day by account holders in a certain branch. (Savings Bank database)
- A report on how many 15 year olds hold bank accounts with the institution. (Customer database)
All this information is valuable business information for marketing but can be answered from a simple reporting repository or indeed the operational database in which the information is collected.
Examples where a data warehouse would be of value using the same information would be:
- How many 15 year olds with accounts in the bank and term deposits over $1,000 are likely to make savings banks deposits next month
The above request would potentially take many hours of processing against multiple sources of data, tying up valuable operational computing resources and needing additional interim storage in order to answer a question that may be posed only once.
In this case, a properly organised data warehouse with a method of storage designed to multi-thread queries against more than one database at at a time would be a very suitable approach.