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Is B.I. a business or technical project? There are too many variables to answer this categorically; I'm tempted to VTC the question as it doesn't really have a single correct answer. However, on seco …

If you could meaningfully slice the data by key1, key2 or key3 then you could make dimensions out of them. In that case you would have separate dimension tables that had all the values of each key, a …

Business Intelligence Edition Business Intelligence edition has some useful features, like Master Data Services and non-additive aggregations (i.e. anything but sum/count). EE has partitioning and t …

Absolute numbers for months and quarters allow them to sort correctly when used in a query tool. A 'month of year' value is only useful for sorting within a year, but an absolute month value that is …

Snapshotting vs. Running Sums Any approach to point-in-time reporting is effectively equivalent to snapshotting or calculating a running sum. Your options are variations on: Calculate a running su …

Some scenarios for M:M relationships in a data warehouse model Most OLAP servers and ROLAP systems have a means to deal with M:M data structures now, but there are some caveats about this that you wi …

First impressions Depending on your performance requirements, 100TB is a fairly aggressive data volume. If you want Oracle, you should check out their Exadata systems. Also, take a look at the off …

Joel Brown has summed up the nature of a data warehouse. I'll add something here about reporting requirements. What is a data warehouse good for A data warehouse is good for analytical reports wher …

A decentralised data warehouse is essentially a collection of data warehouses maintained by individual regions or business units but made available centrally. These may be on the same physical server …

It's almost a matter of semantics. A lot of hot air gets released in discussions about this but I'm not really convinced that there is any real philosophical depth to a distinction between the two. …

N-Tier may be a disingenuous term I think the term 'N-tier' is disingenouos whe used in the context of a business intelligence system. In transactional systems 'N-Tier' describes a distributed syste …

It seems you want to aggregate location based statistics over time for rainfall. A database structure like the one below would let you do that. The 'data source' could be just a filename, or some in …

Building temporary indexes for ETL jobs is not necessarily bad practice, as the index builds are fairly quick. Where it might not be so efficient is if you have relatively small incremental updates o …

If you have 200 identical sources then you can parameterise a SSIS package with the data source and kick off nultiple threads. These can be controlled within the package by a foreach loop or from an …

With respect to your question about using Vertica during the ETL, it's very rarely necessary (although not unknown) to use a different type of database for the ETL. I would not do that unless you per …