Brian BeckManaging Director| Glenforest Consulting LLCSandy Springs, Ga, United States
Vijay ... your points are well taken. As a person who has implemented data marts in the past, I concur that Kimballs approach has been adopted as the RAD approach to many analytical solutions.
However ... it should be pointed out that by definition a data mart in Kimball's approach is multi-dimensional. This approach works well for known questions, such as what is the sales numbers by region, by state, by sales representative, etc, However, when the user base is more analytical in nature, the use of data marts will result in either a partial answer set, or the need for the DW team to constantly rebuild the data mart to add facts or extend the dimension rows to account for the new data types. Do not mis understand my reply ... I am in favor of using data marts for OLAP analysis with defined user types in a narrow subject area. The downside is that when additional business users request the data mart data to be integrated with other subject areas, the data mart approach can quickly become a data management issue. Saving Changes...
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Vijay SankaranDirector, Application Development| Ford Motor CompanyAnn Arbor, Mi, United States
Brian - you are definitely on-target with this assessment. But I would put forward this thought - for most users, a data warehouse built upon numerous data marts with structured analysis is more than enough. The ability to drill-down and slice across a wide variety of information is more than enough. While it's true that they may not get all the information that they want, the costs of getting this additional information may be high.
The idea of a pure "ad-hoc" warehouse or an exlploration warehouse has been tossed around. But quite frankly, the extraction and transformation processes that are required to pull information to populate an ad-hoc warehouse are simply too complex and costly to implement. So the question that begs itself - should you build a specialized system for one person? We may get there someday, but I think fulfilling the majority of the masses is a good thing today!
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RAJESH K LProject Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, IndiaBengaluru, Karnataka, India
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