Data Warehousing simplified
Two of my favorite articles about data warehousing are Data Warehousing for Cavemen by Philip Greenspun, and the longer version, which is the Data Warehousing chapter of his book, SQL for Web Nerds. While some of the article is dated (HP and Sybase are no longer the leading vendors they were 12 years ago), it is surprising how little has changed. Now there are even more choices of platforms, tools, and programming languages, but the data warehousing problem remains fundamentally the same: how do you build a system that allows non-techies to explore the data?
The goal is that a business expert can sit down at a Web browser, use a sequence of forms to specify a query, and get a result back in an amount of time that seems reasonable.
It turns out that the solution has not changed either, as data warehousing remains an important function for any business that want to make use of the data being collected by their transactional systems. Greenspun walks through a project that his company, ArsDigita, worked on for Levi Strauss. The implementation took two programmers three days to complete. While it is a simple example, it illustrates data warehousing fundamentals, and proves that complexity is not a prerequisite for results that are valuable to the business.
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