The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset, Second Edition

Chapter 4. System Setup

Let's get physical.

Up to this point, we've been talking about project management, business requirements, logical data models, and system architectures. Until now, you haven't needed any technology more sophisticated than a laptop with Office. That changes in this chapter, as we discuss issues surrounding the setup of your development, test, and production systems, and get you ready to start the development process.

As you can see in Figure 4-1, the product installation and setup issues addressed in this chapter come toward the end of the technology track of the Kimball Lifecycle, once you've created your system architecture, and selected any additional products you might need, and worked through the dimensional model design.

We begin by helping you get a handle on the size of your business intelligence system, so you can make decisions about its basic physical configuration. Will you install all the server software components for your DW/BI system on a single machine or several? Will you use clustering or web farms? Do you need to budget for server hardware or expensive storage networks? We can't answer these questions for you, but we've provided some guidance that should help you answer them for yourself.

The decisions you make about your production hardware and software configuration should be reflected, as much as economically feasible, in your test or quality assurance system. It may seem wasteful to spend money on test systems, but if you're serious about ...