Chapter 51
Business Intelligence Database Design
In This Chapter
Understanding Data Warehousing Concepts
Understanding Warehouse Structure and Relationships
Loading Facts and Dimensions
Managing Different Types of Dimensions
The majority of this book discusses Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) databases, which are typically used for operational purposes, such as Sales, Human Resource and Payroll management, Business Process Management, Student Information Systems, and so on. In recent years there has been a slow evolution by a large number of organizations to analyze their data for trends in an attempt to make more informed decisions about a company's direction, which is often referred to as Business Intelligence (BI). When these queries and analytics are run directly against the OLTP database, often conflicts and contention occur that generally affect performance.
To mitigate these problems, organizations usually copy the OLTP database to another server and offload all the reporting to that database. Although this approach may solve some of the problems, it does not completely solve them all. This is because OLTP systems are not optimized for large summary queries that return large volumes of data. In addition, OLTP systems usually don't persist historical data values. Finally, OLTP systems usually have a primary focus as mentioned earlier. As a result, typically, a small population of individuals has a deep understanding of the data.
The next step that is usually taken ...
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