Blog: William McKnight

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Data warehousing: What I've learned in 15 years

In no particular order, I’m going to be addressing this topic in a series of blog entries, starting with the approach to the build.

While a top down approach may seem ideal, data warehouses get built bottoms-up. The best data warehouses are built bottoms-up, but the worst data warehouses are built extreme bottoms-up. By extreme, I mean without any sense of where it’s all going, costing, best practices or where the ROI is going to come from. Like a virus growing within the organization, so the data warehouse expands to encompass other random and redundant data, becoming important enough to keep around, but with an organization that’s never sure why and with increasing concern about what it doesn’t do. Eventually, it gets redone until enough top-down is inserted into the process to make it usable. So, in other words, injecting some top-down elements into data warehousing is essential, but don’t believe it’s going to be complete top-down.

Technorati tags: data warehouse

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