BI Strategy

I have been charged with implementing a BI strategy for my company. As I am new to BI I have been researching BI quite a bit but still feel overwelmed by all the information out there. As far as I have researched, I found many front-end tools that my company can use. I would like to set up some sort of data warehouse. My company will be using scorecards, dashboards, mining, KPIs and analytics. Most of my data is in SQL 2000, some is in SQL 2005. I am looking for the best process to setup the data warehouse and am having a hard time finding the right approach. Some people suggest cubes and others suggest to stay away from cubes and use an OLAP process. I do need a way to keep the data up to date as well, preferably at least daily. Does anyone have thoughts on an approach or 2?

This site(http://www.kimballgroup.com/) is my primary reference for DW-Architechture.

The Kimball group have a book that combines their general project approach(that is above all suppliers) with the approach of how to implement it on the Microsoft BI-platform.

Have a look at "The Microsoft DataWareHouse Toolkit".

HTH

Thomas Ivarsson

|||

Hello again Shawn. A cube and OLAP is the same. If you update your warehouse daily a cube can solve part of your business problem.

Never start a scorecard project without having a the experience of building a data warehouse before that.

HTH

Thomas Ivarsson

|||

Shawn,

6 months ago I was pretty much in the same boat as you. I found that book that Thomas mentioned superb in helping me to implement our DW solution using Microsoft BI Toolkit. I can highly recommend it.

What you should also do is to (having gotten an overview from the Kimball book) buy books on the various specialist areas, i.e. SSAS, SSRS, SSIS - here i found the ones from WROX to be very useful..

Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Professional SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

As they tend to go in to alot more detail than Kimball's book (which is more conceptual) and provide code & examples to show you how it's done "step by step"