Enhance
Enhancement: Is A Successful Data Warehouse Ever Retired?
In today's rapidly changing business environment, yesterday's cutting-edge, black-magic decision is today's standard operating procedure and tomorrow's computer-automated process. That is what technology does: take wild innovation, standardize it and over time drive out the human element.
Despite the talk, in some data warehousing circles, about "throw-away" data warehouses purpose-built for an ad hoc purpose -- think, for example, of the analysis done by mergers & acquisition teams in the time prior to, and just after, an acquisition -- our experience suggests that most real-world production data warehouses:
- are brittle, from a design perspective -- the designers seem to have decided, probably unconsciously, that the kinds and types of decisions their user constituencies were interested in during the design phase were all, and only, the decisions those constituencies would be making...forever.
- are nevertheless under pressure, within 6 to 12 months of their deployment, to morph -- to shift along multiple axes -- dimensions, granularity, even models -- in order to meet changing user requirements.
The problem with brittle data warehouses is that they cannot be modified in any reasonable time, or at all. They can't morph -- designers have to burn them down and begin again. All too often.
By treating enhancements of whatever complexity as an integral part of the data warehousing life cycle, WhereScape RED makes major enhancements and renovations of existing WhereScape RED data warehouses as simple, and at least as rapid, as the initial design-prototype-deploy process. New dimension tables can be prototyped overnight, and taken into production in a few days, as can new facts. Changes in granularity can be made overnight. And new model tables, aggregate tables and whole new analytical areas can be added in a few weeks.
And WhereScape RED can also be used, initially, in projects focused on "enhancing" custom-built data warehouses. Existing data warehouses can quickly and easily be brought under WhereScape RED's methodological control. Designers identify existing objects such as stage, model or fact tables to the WhereScape RED metadata, and those objects can be used as a source to build new analytical areas designed, prototyped, deployed and managed by WhereScape RED. This retrofit process provides organizations with a quick and simple mechanism to enhance an otherwise brittle data warehouse.
For organizations with the time and inclination to take the next step, WhereScape RED also supports a rapid REDevelopment Process, which combines the knowledge acquired in the initial data warehouse development cycle with WhereScape RED's rapid development capabilities to rebuild an existing brittle data warehouse that would otherwise be a target for a burn-down. While REDevelopment will take longer that a retrofit, an entire redesign-to-deployment redesign cycle takes on average 25% of the time of a classic data warehouse reimplementation process, and less than 10% of the time of the original custom data warehouse build process.
Once a data warehouse has been REDeveloped, all the standard WhereScape RED functionality is available to the design and operations teams.
Incredible? Try it -- Download a copy of WhereScape RED now and enhance that brittle custom data warehouse in a week.