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Unit 6: Data Warehousing

6.4.5 Warehouse Administration Notes

The Warehouse Administration process specifies the strategy and requirements for the
maintenance, use and ongoing updates to the data warehouse. Early in the process, the Warehouse
Administration Strategy is established specifically outlining areas including version control,
scheduling, data warehouse usage, security, audit and data governing.

The warehouse administration workflow, tool requirements, evaluation, and testing are also
addressed. As the process continues, modules are designed and built for version control,
scheduling, backup and recovery, archiving, security, audit, and data governing. In addition,
several administration and monitoring tasks are addressed during the process. These include
authorization to access appropriate levels of data, monitoring usage, governing queries,
identifying repetitive queries, calculating metrics, defining access thresholds, adding or removing
users, and updating access authority. To provide successful ongoing support and maintenance of
the warehouse, this process focuses on the automation of the administration tasks, wherever
possible.
6.4.6 Metadata Management

The Metadata Management process determines the Metadata Strategy, and defines requirements
for metadata types, the metadata repository, metadata integration, and metadata access.
The process addresses the integration of metadata for both the incremental and enterprise data
warehouse solutions. A primary objective for this process is to provide technical and business
views of the various aspects of warehouse metadata.

6.4.7 Data Access

The Data Access process focuses on the identification, selection, and design of tools that support
end-user access to the warehouse data. Early in the process, a strategy is established and
requirements are defined as a framework for the data access environment. Tools are evaluated,
tested and recommended.

As the process continues, the user profiles are defined based on the level of data required to
support their analysis, decision-making requirements, and skill level. Detailed requirements
are also collected for the user interface style, queries and reports. With the user profiles in place,
functional requirements, the levels of data to be accessed, and tool criteria are established for
each data access component. In most cases, data access is supported by a variety of tools, rather
than one tool to support every type of user.

6.4.8 Database Design and Build

The goal of the Database Design and Build process is to determine how the database objects are
designed to support the data requirements and provide efficient access to the data. In addition,
the logical and physical database designs are created and validated. Database designs are created
for the relational and multidimensional database objects. During this process, physical data
partitioning, segmentation, and data placement is evaluated against business and user
requirements versus operational constraints. In addition, indexes and key definitions are
determined. This process also generates the database Data Definition Language (DDL), and
builds and implements the development, testing, and production data warehouse database
objects.

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