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Agile Data Warehouse Design Course (3 Days)

Course Objectives  Audience  Content  Instructor  Dates  Price

Dimensional modeling is the proven technique for designing comprehensive, high-performance Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse (BI/DW) systems. Agile dimensional modeling is dimensional model done iteratively, incrementally and collaboratively.

This 3-day design course provides in depth coverage of agile dimensional modeling techniques for improving communication between BI/DW teams and business stakeholders and responding to changing DW requirements. Specifically the course covers BEAM*, the powerful, yet simple method for modelstorming directly with BI stakeholders described in the book ‘Agile Data Warehouse Design: collaborative dimensional modeling, from whiteboard to star schema’.

Throughout the course, BEAM* techniques for BI data requirement analysis, dimensional modeling and star schema design are reinforced by team exercises and real-world examples drawn from the instructor’s consulting experience.

All the dimensional techniques covered on the course are compatible with the best practices and sound advice found in Ralph Kimball’s data warehouse toolkits.

Objectives

You will learn to:

  • Model data requirements directly with stakeholders

  • Translate common cross-industry data analysis requirements into efficient, flexible dimensional models
  • Maximise the usability and performance of your data warehouse or data mart designs

  • Plan, design and incrementally develop agile data warehouse solutions
     

Audience

This course is for anyone interested in learning the latest agile techniques for designing and managing dimensional data warehouses and ETL processes. Beginner, intermediate and experienced data warehouse practitioners, data architects, DBA’s and ETL designers & developers will all benefit from this course.
 

Content

Agile Data Warehousing

  • What the Agile manifesto means for business intelligence/data warehousing

  • The challenge of proactive data warehouse development: the need for agile data modeling techniques

  • Becoming agile: supporting iterative and incremental data warehouse development
     

Dimensional Modeling Fundamentals

  • Data warehousing requirements, challenges and opportunities

  • Modeling for measurement: the case for dimensional modeling

  • Star schema, snowflake schema, facts and dimensions

  • Modeling with BI stakeholders: the case for Agile dimensional modeling
     

Dimensional Modelstorming

  • Business Event Analysis and Modeling (BEAM*): an agile dimensional modeling method

  • Creating inclusive data models using the BEAM* notation

  • Modelstorming: practical techniques for facilitating interactive modeling

  • Using the 7Ws framework (who, what, when, where, how many, why and how) to discover and document BI data requirements

  • Telling business event stories: modeling by example

  • Drawing hierarchy charts: modeling dimensional attributes and hierarchical relationships

  • Sketching timelines: modeling events sequences and business processes

  • Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics: aggregation level, comparisons and query by exception

  • Test-driven design: using data profiling results to validate requirements models

  • Designing high performance star schemas

  • Refactoring stars: welcoming change and responding to it
     

Agile Data Warehouse Design

  • Agile data marts vs. enterprise data warehouses

  • ‘Just enough design up front’ (JEDUF) and ‘just in time’ (JIT) modeling

  • Incremental data warehouse development using data marts: the Data Warehouse Bus Architecture and event matrix planning

  • Using event matrices: Documenting high-level data warehouse design. Planning and estimating their delivery

  • Data Warehouse reuse: conformed dimensions and facts, role playing dimensions

Dimensional Design Patterns using the 7Ws

Who and What: Customer, employee, product and service dimensions

  • Handling Large customer populations with rapidly changing demographic profiles: tracking millions of detail changes per year

  • Customer relationships and organisation structures: using hierarchy maps to handle recursive relationships and variable-depth hierarchies

  • Mixed business models: Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C)

  • Heterogeneous products: dealing with many dimensional attributes and ragged hierarchies

  • Decomposing products and services: bill of materials, components, product bundles

When and Where: Date, time and location dimensions

  • Flexible date handling, ad-hoc ranges and multiple simultaneous calendar events

  • Understanding journeys and trajectories: modeling events with multiple geographies

  • Multinational support: national languages reporting, multi-currencies time zones and local calendars

How Many: Facts, Measures and KPIs

  • Fact table types: transactional, periodic snapshots, accumulating snapshots

  •  Fact additivity: additive, semi-additive and non-additive measures

  • Fact table performance and usability optimisation: indexing, partitioning, aggregation and consolidated fact tables

Why and How: Causal (promotions, weather, reasons) and Event description dimensions

  •  Allocation problems: multi-valued dimensions, bridge tables, weighting factors, impact reports and 'correctly weighted' analysis

  •  Supporting complex combination analysis with pivoted dimensions

  • Combining and separating dimensions

  • Modeling sequential behaviour, causation and outcome using dimensional overloading and step dimensions
     

Instructor

The course is designed and presented by Lawrence Corr

Dates

Next UK course will run 5-7 March 2012 at The Corn Exchange, Leeds. For future dates check our Public Schedule or contact us to arrange an on-site class.

Price

Course fee of £1,250 per attendee includes course workbook, BEAM* reference card, and a copy of  'Agile Data Warehouse Design' by Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto. Refreshments and lunch are provided each day.

Discounts
A 15% group booking discount is available for two or more attendees booking on the same course at the same time.

To book please call +44 (0)7971 964824 or email training@decisionone.co.uk.