CHOOSING A DATA WAREHOUSE END USER ACCESS TOOL

BACKGROUND: The computer is finally being used effectively for managerial and high-level decision making. The analytical processing environment, which is very different from transaction processing environment, looks at and identifies trends and patterns vital to the organization. Empowering the business user to look for causative factors as to "why" and "What if" verse just "what".

All the data warehouse experts agree that the End User Access Tool is one of the critical success factors of any data warehouse implementation. However, very little has been done to aid in the selection of an End User Access Tool with the exception of assisting in gathering requirements. To add to the complexity and confusion new tool vendors are popping up at a astonishing rate. And all or most of the vendors claim adherence to E.F. Codd’s original 12 Rules of OLAP which in itself is controversial.

DESCRIPTION: This seminar is a combination lecture and workshop, wherein the attendee will learn the process of identifying business requirements, and identifying a vendors tool for enabling end users to query, report, and analyze data to satisfy their informational requirements.

Upon completing this seminar the student will:

• Understand the major classifications of Decision Support Systems DSS
• Understand Bill Inmons data warehouse architecture as it relates to OLAP architecture
• Understand how to conduct business requirement analysis
• Be able to use a business matrix to identify a tool or tools for your organization
• Understand the importance of metadata and how each tool integrates with data warehouse metadata
• Understand where to use query tools, development tools, analysis tools, and ROLAP -vs- MDD.

By the end of this course each student will know how to gather requirements, and, based on those requirements defined, complete a RFI, a weighted matrix to score RFI’s and a Tools Procurement Document.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Data warehouse project managers, system developers, system and data architects, database administrators, and those interested in how data can be turned into information and how to compete in the marketplace with information.

INSTRUCTOR: Don Meyer is president of Don Meyer & Associates. He advises clients on all aspects of database administration, Unix/network administration, client/server and data warehouse implementations, including conducting training courses and, conducting database performance audits. Don is Oracle 7 DBA Certified and has published articles on client/server downsizing migrations.

• Trend in IS toward empowering analytical end user
• OLTP -vs- OLAP
• Data warehouse architecture and OLAP design
• departmental datamart level
• star schema
• customized, subset, flexible, summarized, etc.

• Query and reporting
• Multidimensional analysis OLAP
• 4GL Object Oriented development
• Data Mining

• Defined
• E. F. Codd’s 12 Rules/18 Features
• OLAP Council & Standards
• OLAP multidimensional model
• The OLAP Report by Business Intelligence

Addressed will be what the importance is of metadata to the data warehouse and the end user access tool as well it’s considerations and implications

• It’s role
• Business metadata
• Technical metadata
• Metadata tool repositories
• How each vendors products integrate with existing data warehouse metadata.

Capturing Business Requirements for Data Warehouse Access Tool

• End User Interviewing facilitation’s
• Identifying Business Metrics

• HP’s Intelligent warehouse
• Web products

• Gather end user requirements
• Edit standard RFI provided for features you require
• Weight features -- mandatory, desirable based on your requirements.
• Review case studies and Vendor Matrix Chart to decide who to send RFI to
• Rate and score RFI responses and vendor demos -- select vendor

• Based on user requirements given, determine critical features to include in RFI and weight

Duration: 1 Day

Prerequisites: None

Special requirements: None

Optional: Knowledge of data base reporting environments, particularly the data warehouse.