Data Warehouse Design

After the tools and team personnel selections are made, the data warehouse design can begin. The following are the typical steps involved in the datawarehousing project cycle.

• Requirement Gathering
• Physical Environment Setup
• Data Modeling
• ETL
• OLAP Cube Design
• Front End Development
• Report Development
• Performance Tuning
• Query Optimization
• Quality Assurance
• Rolling out to Production
• Production Maintenance
• Incremental Enhancements

Each page listed above represents a typical data warehouse design phase, and has several sections:

• Task Description: This section describes what typically needs to be accomplished during this particular data warehouse design phase.
• Time Requirement: A rough estimate of the amount of time this particular data warehouse task takes.
• Deliverables: Typically at the end of each data warehouse task, one or more documents are produced that fully describe the steps and results of that particular task. This is especially important for consultants to communicate their results to the clients.
• Possible Pitfalls: Things to watch out for. Some of them obvious, some of them not so obvious. All of them are real.

The Additional Observations section contains my own observations on data warehouse processes not included in any of the design steps.