A Overview of Amazon Redshift

This article gives an overview of Amazon Redshift, the cloud data warehouse in AWS.

How do you secure sensitive data in a modern Data Warehouse?

In 2019 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news reported a massive data breach at the Desjardins Group, which is a Canadian financial service cooperative and the largest federation of credit unions in North America. The report indicated, a "malicious" employee copied sensitive personal information collected by Desjardins from their data warehouse. The data breach compromised the […]

Pairing Data Vault and Biml for DW Agility

Agile data warehousing can be challenging. Pairing the right methodologies and tools can help. Here is how my team met the challenge by using Data Vault methodology and BIML scripting.

Exit Stage Right

Comparing Data Warehouse Design Methodologies for Microsoft SQL Server

In this article, Arshad Ali goes intp detail about how a data warehouse is different from operational data store and the different design methodologies for a data warehouse.

Track source dates when loading a data warehouse

A primer on how to reduce network and source system load when reading a relational source into the data warehouse.

Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 R2

SQL Server 2008 introduced many new functional and performance improvements for data warehousing, and SQL Server 2008 R2 includes all these and more. This paper discusses how to use SQL Server 2008 R2 to get great performance as your data warehouse scales up. We present lessons learned during extensive internal data warehouse testing on a 64-core HP Integrity Superdome during the development of the SQL Server 2008 release, and via production experience with large-scale SQL Server customers. Our testing indicates that many customers can expect their performance to nearly double on the same hardware they are currently using, merely by upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 from SQL Server 2005 or earlier, and compressing their fact tables. We cover techniques to improve manageability and performance at high-scale, encompassing data loading (extract, transform, load), query processing, partitioning, index maintenance, indexed view (aggregate) management, and backup and restore.

Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server

Data warehousing and general reporting applications tend to be CPU intensive because they need to read and process a large number of rows. To facilitate quick data processing for queries that touch a large amount of data, Microsoft SQL Server exploits the power of multiple logical processors to provide parallel query processing operations such as parallel scans. Through extensive testing, we have learned that, for most large queries that are executed in a parallel fashion, SQL Server can deliver linear or nearly linear response time speedup as the number of logical processors increases. However, some queries in high parallelism scenarios perform suboptimally. There are also some parallelism issues that can occur in a multi-user parallel query workload. This white paper describes parallel performance problems you might encounter when you run such queries and workloads, and it explains why these issues occur. In addition, it presents how data warehouse developers can detect these issues, and how they can work around them or mitigate them.

3 Fundamental Questions about Data Marts...and Their Answers

A data mart provides the primary access to the data stored in the data warehouse or operational data store. It is a subset of data sourced from the data warehouse or operational data store specifically focused on a business function or set of related business functions. Read on to learn the answers to fundamental questions about data marts.

Data Distribution - Part 1

The start of a new series from Leo Peysakhovich that looks at some of the issues with moving data around between systems and ensuring that it is in sync between them.