Balanced Scorecard & More

DataWarehouses - What happens in Reality?

Learning Data Warehouses 101 brought to light quite a few concepts that were fuzzy in my brain, but as a good read always does, it raised more questions.

Before I pour my questions and thoughts, leme write about DW as I have understood with the help of an example:

Consider the Airline industry - well I read and heard a lot about this, so that's the example I'm going for. Say, the Senior Management of Southwest wants to know how our business is performing and expects me to present a full picture. Each of these big shots want to know about a particular aspect - obviously, they don't tell me what it is they want to see - they probably don't even know !

I begin digging and try to figure out the entire process.

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Multiple Data sources – As one would expect, there are a lot of sources of data – e.g. the Customer related data, Supply related data from Vendors, data about my own employees which is internal to the Company, Inventory and so on.  These are termed as the Operational Source systems

Anyone who knows DW has made or seen this diagram and with that assumption, I am also not going to delve into why we need a ODS or what is a Data mart.

So coming back to my airline example, I now begin to build my report trying to incorporate what the Senior management would really like to see.

1.       How has the overall revenue increased from previous Quarter to current Quarter and how do the forecasts look like? – This is easy enough to present because I know I need to get this number from my Warehouse section.