How to prioritize Data Warehouse development

Attempting to deliver your Data Warehouse in a single iteration, “waterfall” style, would be very difficult. Today’s agile development process demands that the tasks be broken down into smaller iterative phases that incrementally deliver value. This means you need to prioritize your Data Warehouse development. In the case of a Data Warehouse, the business value…

What is a Data Warehouse Bus Matrix? (and why you need one)

A “Data Warehouse Bus Matrix” describes the high-level design of a Data Warehouse. At a glance, it shows all the facts and dimensions of a data warehouse and their relationships in a table-like ‘matrix’. It’s useful as a tool to design, plan, estimate and communicate your data warehouse. The “Data Warehouse Matrix” comes from the…

|

What is a Semantic Layer? (and why you need one)

What is a Semantic Layer A semantic layer exists to present data to users as a set of related and commonly understood business entities, terms and metrics. A semantic layer is typically the “top” layer of a data warehouse/lakehouse. It is accessible to end users and report developers, who use it as the source for…

Metadata Driven Data Warehouse (MDW) vs Traditional ETL tools

Here at Dimodelo Solutions, we are passionate about data warehouses and the benefits they can bring an organisation. But we are equally passionate about the art and practice (the how) of building these critical information assets. This is why we developed our Metadata Driven Data Warehouse tool “Dimodelo Data Warehouse Studio” (formally Dimodelo Architect). What…

We believe in the power of a Data Warehouse!

“The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain. Have you heard “The Data Warehouse is dead”? This claim appears from time to time, usually accompanied by the latest next big thing in Data processing (Self Service BI, Big Data, Data Virtualization etc). However, what these claims fail to understand is a…

Azure Synapse Analytics- Alternative for @@ROWCOUNT or ROWCOUNT_BIG – Quick Tip

This quick tip describes how to get Row Count in Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure Data Warehouse).  Azure Data Warehouse doesn’t support @@ROWCOUNT or ROWCOUNT_BIG. The link offers an alternative. This article modified that alternative to return the row count value as an OUTPUT parameter so a variable can be set to the row count value….

Create a User to run ETL on Azure Synapse Analytics – Quick Tip

To run ETL on Azure Data Warehouse, it’s a good idea to create a user in a higher resource class. There are a number of ways to authenticate to Azure DW. See – Controlling and granting database access to SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse The easiest (from a development perspective) is to create an…

|

Conversations with Data Warehouse Experts – Klaus Lindinger

  In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Klaus Lindinger, Digital Innovation Officer at dataWerks & Partner at Infoteam Sales Process Consulting, based in Frankfurt.  Over the past 30 years Klaus has worked with some of the world’s largest software brands. His first introduction to business intelligence, believe it or not, was collecting…

| |

Persistent Staging Case Study – Employee Fact in Human Resources Data Warehouse

This post is the second in a series of detailed cases studies discussing the ETL strategies that can be used when a Persistent staging layer is included in your Data Warehouse. It’s intended as a reference for developers using Dimodelo Data Warehouse Studio, our Data Warehouse Automation tool to quickly build a Data Warehouse. It’s most…