Summary

The goal of this chapter is to highlight the most important issues for you to think about when deploying a DW/BI system. Deploying a system safely and successfully requires a lot of work and planning. You need the entire DW/BI team and help from business experts.

The DW/BI team has to focus on developing solid operations and performance tests. Equally important, these back-room folks should concentrate on building and testing a playbook for the actual deployment process. The deployment playbook is vitally important when youre adding new functionality to an existing system, while minimizing end user impact. The goal for the playbook should be to write instructions so clear and simple that anyone could follow them. You shouldnt have to think deep thoughts while youre trying to deploy a system.

The front-room team focuses on queries, reports, and user interactions. During the deployment process, this team concentrates on running quality assurance tests on the data and reports . You have to rely heavily on the business experts for this testing work too. Theyre the ones who will confirm the datas accuracy. The front-room team also needs to develop system documentation, tools for searching and viewing that documentation, and training for the business users. Unless youve done documentation and training development before, youll be surprised at how much time it takes to do this soft stuff well.

In our experience, problems with deploying a system almost always derive from incomplete testing. Test everything: your procedures, operations, and performance. Test the upgrade scripts. Check the results. Dont approach the actual rollout date with an attitude that says, This should work. The right attitude is Weve tested this every way we could think of, and it will work.

When you do finally roll out the system, with no wrinkles at all, take a break. Youve earned it! Then turn on your usage-monitoring tools, sit back, and watch what the business users are doing with their great new system.



Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit. With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset
The MicrosoftВ Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL ServerВ 2005 and the MicrosoftВ Business Intelligence Toolset
ISBN: B000YIVXC2
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 125

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