Riadh Ben Messaoud

1. The Big Picture2. Data Warehouse Philosophy3. Data Warehouse Concepts4. Warehousing Applications5. Warehouse Schema Design6. Business Intelligence Reporting7. On-Line Analytical Processing8. OLAP Applications9. Data Warehouse Implementation10. Warehousing Software

2Data Warehouses & OLAP

1. The Big Picture2. Data Warehouse Philosophy3. Data Warehouse Concepts4. Warehousing Applications5. Warehouse Schema Design6. Business Intelligence Reporting7. On-Line Analytical Processing8. OLAP Applications9. Data Warehouse Implementation10. Warehousing Software

3Data Warehouses & OLAP

Data Warehouses & OLAP 4

BI Reporting is the face of a data warehouse

BI Reporting is what the DW customers see

All the hardware, software, data architectures, data models, Source System Analysis, Target System Analysis, and ETL applications will be counted a blazing failure if the BI Reporting fails

Data Warehouses & OLAP 5

Data Warehouses & OLAP 6

BI Reporting Success Factors

Performance

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ returns answer sets in a consistent time frame

◦ manages the finite resource of CPU cycles and I/Os

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application ◦ fails to manage the consumption of DW ressources

◦ allows a two-minute report to become a two-hour report

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BI Reporting Success Factors

User Interface (UI)

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ is intuitive and easily understood

◦ is organized along the thought processes and methods already present in the enterprise

◦ allows to answer question native to the enterprise

◦ is the reflexion of the enterprise into the UI

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application requires DW customers to ◦ learn the tool, translate their business questions into tool queries, and then

translate the “tool” result sets into business information

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BI Reporting Success Factors

Alignment with the Data Model

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ synchronizes with the relations and relational integrity of a data

model

◦ reflects the relations and cardinalities of the enterprise

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application ◦ violates the relations and relational integrity of a data model

◦ distorts the reflection of the enterprise

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BI Reporting Success Factors

Ability to Answer Questions

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ is able to use the data in a DW to answer the questions posed to it

◦ is able to give a correct set of answers

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application ◦ is not able to generate the correct answer set with the data

elements available

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BI Reporting Success Factors

Mobility

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ empowers DW customers to take the answer set with them

◦ enable DW customes to save, print, copy/paste the information to any destination

Does the enterprise require BI reports be printed, captured as permanent documents, published through an intranet, published real-time through an Internet Web site to enterprise agents around the globe?

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BI Reporting Success Factors

Flexibility

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ can answer questions that have never before been

asked

◦ helps its customers to keep up with the dynamic and changing marketplace

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application◦ expects the world to remain static and frozen ;

expecting the world will always look as it does now

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BI Reporting Success Factors

Availability

A successful BI Reporting application ◦ is available during the active cycles of the enterprise

◦ requires coordination with ETL applications

An unsuccessful BI Reporting application◦ fails to match the active cycles of the enterprise

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BI Customer Success Factors

Proactive Processes

The enterprise needs to know when a problem is approaching with the maximum possible lead-time

Allows the enterprise to align its resources to prepare the best possible response to the approaching problem

BI Reporting application should relieve customers of the need to remember to query enterprise data

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BI Customer Success Factors

Reactive Processes

The enterprise needs to assess its recent past in the context of long-term and seasonal trends

Business processes such as these are reactive because they allow the enterprise to react to recent events

BI Reporting customers need the toolsets necessary to review and analyze recent events in the context of long-term and seasonal trends

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BI Customer Success Factors

Ad Hoc Processes

Not all questions have been identified and programmed into a BI Reporting application because not all questions are known

The enterprise may not be able to wait for a BI Reporting developer to gather the requirements, develop, test, and release the report back to the enterprise

A member of the enterprise must be able to ask the question in the timeframe of the enterprise

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BI Customer Success Factors

Data Needs

Data is the granular minutia values that document the existence of an enterprise entity or measure an enterprise event

A BI Reporting application’s ability to present enterprise data is a success factor for the customers as they use the BI Reporting application

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BI Customer Success Factors

Information Needs

Information questions juxtapose two or more data points to answer a question that is expected to yield an answer that will help the enterprise

A BI Reporting application’s ability to answer informational questions is a success factor for the customers as they use the BI Reporting application

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BI Customer Success Factors

Analytic Needs

Sometimes, the question that must be answered is, “What question should I ask?”

Business analysts search the enterprise and its environment for a question

Searching for a correlation between events, for an association between factors within and around the enterprise