Summary: Data warehousing is becoming more and more popular with every passing day as most of the companies are taking the support of data warehousing as it is really helpful to win over a new customer, develop new products and lower the costs. Searching through the data meant for corporate transactions can provide insights and highlight critical facts that can improve your business. Data warehousing has been a common practice for big companies, but now even small organizations can avail it’s advantages due to the reduced cost of data warehousing technology.

Here are some steps that are considered in implementing your data warehousing solution:

1-Recognize that the job is probably harder than you expect.

According to reports of several experts, 30-50 percent of the information in a typical database is missing or incorrect. This much percentage of error is completely unacceptable in a data warehousing system that is designed to sort through millions of historical records to identify trends or select customers for a new product or service. Sometimes, the data is correct, but it may not be usable in a data warehouse environment. For examples, legacy system programmers use shortcuts to save the disk space. They use numbers in place of the names of cities and thus their data is meaningless in a generic environment.

2- Understand the data in your existing systems

The second step is an important part of understanding the existing data. It is done to determine the interrelationships between various systems. Interrelationship is essential to be maintained while moving the data into the warehouse. One must have a clear idea about the data relationships among various heterogeneous systems to determine how any change may impact the system.

3-Do recognize equivalent entities

One of the most important points while preparing for a data warehousing project is to identify equivalent entities and heterogeneous systems. This problem generally occurs when the same kind of information appears under different field names. For example, it is possible that two different companies may be serving the same customer but they may be using the name differently such as AIG and American International Group.

4- Using Metadata

Metedata is considered highly crucial for successful data warehousing implementation. Metadata refers to the data that indicates the subject of a web document. There are various categories of data that can be associated with a database to characterize an index data, facilitate or restrict access to data, determine the source and currency of data etc. One major task is to synchronize the metadata between various vendor products, different functions and several metadata stores.

5-Choose the right data transformation tools

Data transformation tools are required to extract data from the operational sources, clean it and load it into the data warehouse. Such a transformation process involves the creation and population of new fields from operational data, surprising data to an appropriate level for analysis and error checking operations to validate the integrity of data. Hence, buy tools that ensure a high level of data transformation. This usually requires the help of a good data warehousing consultant.

6- Use external sources

The third party provides the external data such as data from a customer’s transaction processing systems or market research data and they are great value for internal information. For example, you want to know the income of the customers in a particular country; you can easily do so using external data sources. This type of data will not provide you with the exact information, but it will give you a rough idea about their income.

7- Use new information distribution methods

Today, with the advancement in technology, information can be distributed in several ways directly to individuals who require it. Now, it is very easy to subscribe to regular reports and have them delivered through email. Another good way to delver information is to let the users log in, search for the desired data and open the files that give the desired information.

8- Focus on hot marketing applications

Applications in data warehousing involve high-payback marketing applications. For example, catalog manufacturers are using them to generate higher sales.

9- Focus on early wins to build support throughout the organization

Off- the- shelf solutions can be used to provide point solutions in a short time that serve as a training and demonstration platform and then build for full-scale implementation. Many times is still requires data warehouse consulting.

10- Do not undervalue hardware equipments

Hardware equipments are required, as a large number of CPU cycles are needed to slice and dice the data again and again to fulfill various types of needs of users throughout the organization.

11- Outsource your data ware house development and maintenance

Most of the companies these days outsource the data warehouse development and maintenance in order to avoid the difficulty of locating the high cost of retaining skilled IT staff.

An expert data warehouse designer has written this article.

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