At the core of an enterprise BI/DW program is the data that is being made available to the business users who are looking to make better decisions using this information. Properly managing this information is the most critical activity of the enterprise BI team.  Read more...

Business intelligence (BI) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have conflicting principles and needs. This article will show you how to make peace between them.  Read more...

In Part 1 of this extensive series, Wes Dumey starts some of the core concepts of data warehousing. In this video he covers what a data warehouse is, why companies use them and what are some of the key components.  Read more...

In response to the first part, new author Richard Gardner brings us a few more issues that you should be aware of when planning your data warehouse.   Read more...

BI Architect Bill Pearson continues his introduction to enhanced features in Analysis Services 2005 for Time Intelligence support. In this session, we examine new, wizard-driven features that support the easy addition of Time Intelligence within our cube.  Read more...

In this first part of a multiple part series, Brian Knight shows the different types of slowly changing dimensions you'll use and the business reason for using each type.   Read more...

Building a data warehouse usually isn't a small project, but somehow management sometimes sees it as something that can quickly eb done with a tool or two. Longtime DBA Janet Wong brings us a look at some of the problems you might face when getting ready to embark on this type of project.   Read more...

Usually a data warehouse is used for some sort of Business Intelligence system. Data warehousing experts Vincent Rainardi and Amar Gaddam bring us another great article on warehousing with a look at how a warehouse might be used for a CRM system.   Read more...

When loading a data warehouse, handling the ETL process of working with files can be problematic. Longtime DBA Janet Wong brings us an interesting solution that is flexible and efficient for quickly loading a number of files into a warehouse using DTS.   Read more...

Part 3 of Vincent Rainardi's data warehousing series looks at some of the situations and challenges of loading a fact table in a data warehouse.   Read more...

By doing a bit of groundwork and effectively controlling the scope of the metadata repository continuously throughout the project, few problems should arise.  Read more...

DW/BI professionals are often tasked with making evolutionary upgrades and improvements to minimize cost and upheaval in the current analytic environment. We explore four upgrades that can breathe new life into legacy data warehouses.  Read more...

Data warehousing is becoming more and more popular, especially as companies seek to leverage the information stored in various systems to improve their business processes. Warehousing expert Vincent Rainardi brings us the next installment of his series on data warehousing, examining the issues of loading data.   Read more...

Is your company trying to accelerate cycle times, lower costs, improve responsiveness, ensure compliance with policies and best practices, and increase customer satisfaction? Well, of course! That's why you need a comprehensive approach to managing your organization's business rules  Read more...

This article takes a look at SQL Server 2005 Reporting Solutions as applied to Business Intelligence systems.  Read more...

What is data quality? How do you measure it and how does it affect your data warehouse? SQL Server warehousing expert Janet Wong brings us a look at what data quality is and what it means to you.   Read more...

True business value lies in using the data model as an entry point for a program of data management that treasures data as the most valuable corporate asset.  Read more...

What type of things do you need to look at when setting up a data warehouse? Hardware is a big one as well as the settings for the server, which may be substantially different than transactional systems most DBAs work with. Warehousing expert Vincent Rainardi brings us the next installment in his data warehousing series with some advice on what you should be looking for.   Read more...

Master data management (MDM) and eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) are two key technologies that promise to address important information management issues. Ventana Research believes both will enable companies to reduce the cost, time and effort needed to collect, analyze and use information, whether for visibility, decision support or process execution. Some observers may see them as competing approaches, but in practice each has capabilities best suited to some applications and not others. Even where they overlap, the two may not be mutually exclusive. We advise companies that have not yet begun investigating XBRL and MDM to do so immediately, and all organizations should begin developing skills in using them.   Read more...

In Part 2 of this series, Wes Dumey talks about some of the key tables in a data warehousing scenario. He covers fact tables, dimensions and some of the other tables you'll see in a data warehouse. Free registration required.   Read more...

Part two of his series on table schema changes, this article examines those changes that affect the actual data. Read this great article from Alok Dwivedi.  Read more...

Visit ten randomly picked customers that own a data warehouse architecture, and you will see that at least eight have developed a classic data warehouse architecture (CDWA). What do I mean by a CDWA? In a CDWA, data is copied periodically from production systems to the central data warehouse.  Read more...

What happens behind the scenes when you alter a table schema? New author Alok Dwivedi dives deep into SQL Server to show us how things are affected.  Read more...