Data Warehousing

Most business struggle with the process of integrating and storing organizational data effectively.   Your data probably lives in multiple systems in different, inconsistent formats making it difficult to have insight across the organization.

A data warehouse is designed with your business intelligence needs in mind.  By creating a data store optimized towards reporting, near real-time visibility into complex data can be achieved through an integrated, centrally managed, and trusted data source.

Net Fusion has significant experience in designing and building data warehouses and utilizing tools such as SQL Reporting Services and Microsoft PerformancePoint to display data in meaningful ways.

Technical Overview

A data warehouse is a database used to hold and aggregate data from sources such as internal databases, feeds and external data.   Unlike transaction processing databases which are optimized for fast write operations, a warehouse is designed to facilitate rapid read operations.   These read operations do not have any impact on the transaction database used to gather application data; this is accomplished by separating the data warehouse from the application database and using specific design patterns associated with data warehousing.

After the warehouse has been populated, different methods for analyzing and presenting the data must be constructed.   In many cases, structures called cubes are used to create multidimensional views of the data in the warehouse.   These views are then presented to users through the use of reports and dashboards.

External Resources

Case Study - Three Terabyte Data Warehouse Set for Growth with SQL Server 2005

An Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services