A Journey to Data Architect ..

  Traditional Data Warehouse Concepts A  data warehouse  is any system that collates data from a wide range of sources within an organization. Data warehouses are used as centralized data repositories for analytical and reporting purposes. A traditional data warehouse is located on-site at your offices. You purchase the hardware, the server rooms and hire the staff to run it. They are also called on-premises, on-prem or (grammatically incorrect) on-premise data warehouses. Facts, Dimensions, and Measures The core building blocks of information in a data warehouse are facts, dimensions, and measures. A  fact  is the part of your data that indicates a specific occurrence or transaction. For example, if your business sells flowers, some facts you would see in your data warehouse are: Sold 30 roses in-store for $19.99 Ordered 500 new flower pots from China for $1500 Paid salary of cashier for this month $1000 Several numbers can describe each fact, and we call these...

Two pioneers of data warehousing named Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball had different approaches to data warehouse design. Kimball Method: Build Data Marts for each line of Business with refine data and then Load to Data Warehouse. The Kimball data warehouse design uses a “ bottom-up ” approach. Inmon Method: Build Data warehouse with refined data and then build Data Marts for each line of Business/Subject area. This is known as a top-down approach to data warehousing Data Warehouse Architecture: Traditional vs. Cloud A  data warehouse  is an electronic system that gathers data from a wide range of sources within a company and uses the data to support management decision-making. Companies are increasingly moving towards cloud-based data warehouses instead of traditional on-premise systems. Cloud-based data warehouses differ from traditional warehouses in the following ways: There is no need to purchase physical hardware. It’s quicker and cheaper to set up and scale cloud data war...