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

Part 1. Requirements, Realities, and Architecture

• Chapter 1: Defining Business Requirements

• Chapter 2: Designing the Business Process Dimensional Model

• Chapter 3: The Toolset

• Chapter 4: System Setup

This first part of the lifecycle is where you lay the foundation for your success. Working with the business folks to understand and prioritize their requirements for analytics as we describe in Chapter 1 helps you set specific goals for your first pass through the lifecycle that are both valuable to the organization and achievable in a reasonable timeframe. Your understanding of the business requirements becomes the basis for designing a flexible, usable, high-performing dimensional model in Chapter 2.

What you learn in the first two chapters helps you tackle the architecture and technology track at the top of the Lifecycle. Your business understanding helps you determine what architectural components are important for your DW/BI system. Once you know the problem, you can identify the specific functionality you need, and where that functionality will come from in the Microsoft SQL Server toolset. This, in turn, allows you to make decisions on the server configurations and disk subsystems that will form the basic infrastructure of your DW/BI system.

Part 1 is about getting the lay of the land before you decide what you are going to build and where you will build it. Your primary focus here is on identifying the most promising business opportunities and designing the data structures and system ...