The Data Warehouse Blog

Welcome to my Data Warehouse Blog! To illustrate the motivations to come up with this blog I’d like to tell you a little story first.

Back around 1995 I was working for a software company, which had been the market leader for Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Electronic Territory Managment Systems (ETMS) software for the pharmaceutical industry in Germany. As the leader of the server development team I was in charge of the programs and the underlying Oracle database, which guaranteed a multi-directional data flow between the different sales reps and the head office.Reps were reporting sales calls and additional data about their activities as well as certain characteristics of the doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals they visited. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies were buying turnover and sales volumes data from external providers based on geographical segments, time, and different levels of a self-defined “product hierarchy”.

All this valuable data was residing in the database on the server, which obviously triggered the desire for analytical applications.

Long before I had been responsible for the server, an analytical application had been developed by a another team. This application did no longer satisfy the growing demands of the very heterogeneous user base and thus, we decided to abandon it and to develop a new suite of analytical applications, based on a real data warehouse, from scratch.

Then, someone had the very smart idea to check the market for out-of-the-box solutions! Plus, some of our customers were already using BI systems like Cognos. After contacting Cognos we agreed to hold a three day in-house workshop as a proof of concept and soon, three Cognos staffers showed up at our office in Heidelberg: The unavoidable sales guy, a senior pre-sales consultant, and a quite attractive and very nice young woman, who seemed to be new to the company and apparently doing some training on the job. I can’t recall her name today, so let’s call her Lucy.
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