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

Chapter 16. Deployment

"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men."

—— Brooke Foss Wescott

As you see in Figure 16-1, the deployment step in the Kimball Lifecycle is where the three parallel development tracks come back together. This is the great unveiling of the DW/BI system to the business community. The quality of this first impression will strongly influence the acceptance of the system — and you get only one shot at it. Like any big event, a lot of details must fall into place in order for the show to be successful.

Figure 16-1. The deployment step in the Kimball Lifecycle

Most systems professionals think of deployment as moving code from development to test to production. As far as it goes, they're correct: Deploying code and data to the production servers is a fundamental part of providing end user access. But the system deployment is only part of the deployment story. The deployment step includes pre-deployment testing, as well as all the pieces needed to give the business users access to the information. To be effective, the deployment effort should begin early in the Lifecycle. While you're creating the architecture and building the data warehouse and the BI applications, you must also be defining and running tests, creating documentation, preparing training, and organizing the user support processes. All these services need to ...