Designing a Data Warehouse: Supporting Customer Relationship Management

SUMMARY

We need a conceptual model for data warehousing in which we can include all the complex aspects of our design, without making the model too complex for users to comprehend. One of the major strengths of the first-generation solutions was its inherent simplicity. However, as we have seen, the industry has moved on and the next-generation data warehouse must evolve to support the kinds of information our users will demand. For a data warehouse to support CRM properly, we need a customer-centric model, which, while using the strengths and benefits of the old behavior-centric solutions, is much more in tune with customers' circumstances, especially their changing circumstances. As we have seen in previous chapters, often it is these changing ...