Chapter 11: Working with an Existing Data Warehouse

Doing the best with what you have

Overview

Throughout this book, weve been talking as if youre starting from scratch with your data warehouse system. Starting from a blank slate, you gather business requirements, identify priorities, design a business process dimensional model, implement your ETL system, build OLAP databases and data mining models, and develop and deploy BI applications for your user community. Building a data warehouse system is a cyclical process that involves all these steps on each round.

In this chapter we confront the reality that you may have some data warehousing infrastructure in place already. We even let our imaginations run so wild as to consider that your existing DW/BI system might be experiencing some problems. A move to the new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 technology can be a good time to address some existing issues.

After we discuss how to use SQL Server 2005 to improve your existing DW/BI system, we outline the issues that you might encounter as you migrate your infrastructure from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. We end the chapter with a discussion of integrating the various BI components of SQL Server 2005 into a heterogeneous environment that includes non-Microsoft components .