Ramping up on data warehouse design

As many of you know PerformancePoint Server is now licensed as part of the SharePoint Enterprise version. As a result of this change, those of us who focus on SharePoint have a much more significant role in presenting Microsoft’s approach to business intelligence. In a nutshell, SharePoint (plus PerformancePoint) and Excel ARE the business intelligence front-end. However, data warehouse and cube design are extremely critical to any good BI implementation.

To that end, my colleague, Rick Brewis, a SQL technical specialist, compiled a great list of resources related to data warehouse design. If you are in the process of assessing your data warehouse needs see Rick’s list below for some great resources and starting points:

• Check out this book, “The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset” - https://www.kimballgroup.com/html/booksMDWT.html
  • This book really covers the details on creating, designing, and managing data warehouses

• SQL 2008 Data Warehousing home page - https://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/data-warehousing.aspx
• Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008 - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc719165.aspx
• Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc719182.aspx
• TechNet Article: SQL Server 2008 Data Warehouse Query Performance - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.04.dwperformance.aspx
• TechNet Articles, Videos, and BLOG on SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dd421879.aspx
• Good Webcasts on Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2005 – these approaches still are applicable
  • TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Using the Kimball Method (Level 200) 
  • TechNet Webcast: Designing a Scalable Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence (DW/BI) System (Level 200)
  • TechNet Webcast: Getting Started with Data Mining (Level 200)
  • MSDN Architecture Webcast: Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to Populate a Kimball Method Data Warehouse (Level 200)

• Take a look at the Agenda Topics for this 4 Day Seminar that Kimball Group puts on every once in awhile – gives you a good understanding of the various subject areas you need to be thinking about for Data Mining - https://blogs.msdn.com/genewebb/archive/2007/11/12/microsoft-data-warehouse-in-depth-by-joy-mundy-and-warren-thornthwaite-co-authors-of-the-newly-published-microsoft-data-warehouse-toolkit.aspx
• There used to be some free SQL Server 2008 eLearning Classes that might still be around at:  https://blogs.msdn.com/genewebb/archive/2008/10/06/free-sql-2008-classes-on-microsoft-learning.aspx

Hope this helps to start you off.  There is a wealth of knowledge in these links.  The Kimball Group Book is a great start.  The videos, webcasts, and white papers provide you concrete examples to build upon the information discussed in the book.

Also, one final note: I found the wikipedia entry for data warehouse to be fairly informative. It gives a brief history and of course covers the two design methodologies: top-down (Inmon) and bottom-up (Kimball, referenced above).

Thanks!