We’re currently running a series of blog postings on what to really focus on to get the most business value when your resources are limited.  The postings are based on a presentation given to leaders in small to medium sized companies.  This is the fifth in the series.

In our last posting we started looking at a product called RED from WhereScape as a means of building a data warehouse fast using an approach such as Agile.  In addition to supporting the design phase RED goes all the way through to live code and as far as it reasonably can, it self-documents to show diagrammatically where the data in each table is sourced from.  The various areas covered are shown in the slide.

Finally I thought it was worth including a couple of overview diagrams.  The first is to show the different stages that data flows through in populating fact tables and OLAP cubes for business people to use.  Note that you need a reporting tool, that’s not part of the offering.

 

 

 

The second is to show an example of the type of data flow that can be built up.  There’s no way that you could spot the connectivity between the various tables without an overview capability like this.  I think what really jumps out is just how much of the complexity is in encoding the business rules.

 

In the next posting we’ll move on to consider some popular architectures for information and data provision.