This course is for developers, managers, designers, data and database administrators and anyone interested in the field of building decision support applications.

One of the most dramatic new developments in database design is the data warehouse, a powerful database model that significantly enhances managers' abilities to quickly analyze large multidimensional data sets. In this course students can learn practical information needed to design, manage, build and use dimensional data warehouses for virtually any type of business application. Employing many real-life case studies of data warehouses, the course provides clear guidelines on how to model data and design data warehouses to support advanced multidimensional decision support systems. Product-Oriented and Customer-Oriented data warehouse examples are explored. Beginning with a simple grocery store data warehouse example the course progresses to complex business applications in retail, manufacturing, banking, insurance, subscriptions, and airline reservations.

How to design and build a data warehouse Migration to a data warehouse Life cycle of a data warehouse How the ETL Process works When transactional and when snapshot grains make sense How to build a value chain for the business How to get the most from star joins and standard data models How data marts and OLAP fit with data warehousing schemes What is Metadata What is Data Mining Data Warehousing Benchmarks

Part I Business Intelligence


Equipping the Organization for Effective Decision Making

• Effective Decision Making
  
• Keys to Effective Decision Making
  
• Business Intelligence
  Making the Most of What You’ve Got—Using Business Intelligence
  
• What Business Intelligence Can Do For You
  
• Business Intelligence at Many Levels
  
• Maximum Miniatures, Inc.
  
• Building the Foundation
  Searching for the Source—The Source of Business Intelligence
  
• Seeking the Source
  
• The Data Mart
  
• Snowflakes, Stars, and Analysis Services
  One-Stop Shopping—The Unified Dimensional Model
  
• Online Analytical Processing
  
• The Unified Dimensional Model
  
• Tools of the Trade
  First Steps—Beginning the Development of Business Intelligence
  
• The Business Intelligence Development Studio
  
• The SQL Server Management Studio
  
• Don Your Hardhat
  
  
  Part II Defining Business Intelligence Structures
  
  
  Building Foundations—Creating and Populating Data Marts
  
• Data Mart
  
• Designing a Data Mart
  
• The Benefits of Integration
  Fill’er up—Using Integration Services for Populating Data Marts
  
• Integration Services
  
• Package Development Features
  
• Putting Integration Services Packages into Production
  
• Meanwhile, Back at the Unified Dimensional Model (UDM)
  
  
  Part III Analyzing Cube Content
  
  
  Cubism—Measures and Dimensions
  
• Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
  
• Measures
  
• Dimensions
  
• You Are Special
  Bells and Whistles—Special Features of OLAP Cubes
  
• Where No Cube Has Gone Before
  
• Additional Cube Features
  
• More Sophisticated Scripting
  Writing a New Script—MDX Scripting
  
• Terms and Concepts
  
• Putting MDX Scripting to Work
  
• Extracting Data from Cubes
  Pulling It Out and Building It Up—MDX Queries
  
• The MDX SELECT Statement
  
• Additional MDX Syntax
  
• Can You Dig It?
  
  
  Part IV Mining
  
  
  Panning for Gold—Introduction to Data Mining
  
• What Is Data Mining?
  
• Data Mining Algorithms
  
• Grab a Pick Axe
  Building the Mine—Working with the Data Mining Model
  
• Data Mining Structure
  
• Mining Model Viewer
  
• Reading the Tea Leaves
  Spelunking—Exploration Using Data Mining
  
• Mining Accuracy Chart
  
• Mining Model Prediction
  
• Data Mining Extensions
  
• Special Delivery
  
  
  Part V Delivering
  
  
  On Report—Delivering Business Intelligence with Reporting Services
  
• Reporting Services
  
• Report Servicing Architecture
  
• Report Creation
  
• Report Manager
  
• Managing Reports on the Report Server
  
• Ad Hoc Reporting
  
• Putting It All Together
  
• ADOMD.NET