Welcome to the first post of my re-designed and re-lauched Data Warehouse blog!

In this data warehouse blog I’d like to share and discuss some of the experiences and conclusions I made in more than twenty years of designing and building data warehouses (DWH) and business intelligence (BI) solutions.

It all might be biased and you might disagree with some or many of the concepts I’m going to present here. Please feel free to comment and start some fruitful and open discussions.

To get straight down to the nitty-gritty, it all boils down to this:

• Do thorough analyses of every aspect of the system.
• Establish a system of guidelines and standards.
• Create metadata-driven, generic models from the results of the analyses and from the guidelines.
• Create a tool for easily maintaining all metadata.
• Establish a system of naming conventions.
• Create tools to maintain data warehouse objects from models, associated metadata, and naming conventions.

This is the basis and your toolbox for many DWH and BI projects to come! As a result of this, you not only achieve a clear procedure model for the DWH system, but also for the entire project.

I’m going to explain all this in the upcoming posts. We will dive deep into the details and there will be numerous real-life examples.

The blog will cover topics like

• ETL process modeling
• Metadata
• Multidimensional data modeling
• Irregular hierarchies
• Aggregation along diamond shapes
• Data warehouse and BI project management
• Procedure model
• Requirements engineering
• etc.

Related to this I will present und discuss parts of the data warehouse framework I have developed over the course of the last years.