Stretching Information Integration Boundaries

Alicornio Africa provides a sophisticated offering in the arena of enterprise information management. We offer technology, consulting and training services covering the entire spectrum of information integration, data profiling, data deduplication, data quality management, data warehousing, business intelligence, automation, data mining and customer communications management.

Masterclass

Data Warehouse Design and Development Master Class for Effective BI

This 4 day master class presented by international data warehousing expert Lawrence Corr, combines dimensional data warehouse analysis and design and ETL architecture techniques.


Why Attend?

Dimensional modelling is the proven data modelling technique for developing understandable, high-performance data warehouses and data marts.
Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) are the critical data warehousing processes which take disparate operational data and present it in a cohesive, orderly way for intelligent decision making.

Dimensional analysis and design closes the gap between business analysis requirements and traditional data modelling. The use of dimensional techniques throughout analysis, design and ETL improves productivity and communication between IT and business users by supporting incremental development and more realistically capturing analytical requirements.
This course offers in-depth knowledge of dimensional modelling and ETL techniques essential for successfully building and maintaining cost effective data warehouses. It focuses on proven methods and best practices for modelling, extracting, cleaning, conforming, and delivering data.

Throughout the course dimensional modelling techniques and matching ETL processes are integrated and reinforced by real-world examples and exercises that make extensive use of sample data.

“Learn dimensional modelling and matching ETL techniques together in a single integrated course for the first time”

Why learn dimensional modelling and ETL together?

Data Warehouse Designers/Data Modellers – Even if you are not in the ETL team you need to know the ETL development issues resulting from your designs. You will make better informed design decisions if you know the ETL workload.

ETL Developers – need to understand how dimensional modelling is carried out and why operational and other data sources are remodelled so as to best cleanse and transform the data and help realign data warehouse designs to data realities.

Audience

This course is for anyone interested in learning the latest techniques for planning, designing and managing dimensional data warehouses and ETL processes including real-time data warehousing and enterprise information integration.

Beginner, intermediate and experienced data warehouse practitioners, data architects, DBA’s and ETL designers & developers will all benefit from this course.

Objectives

Upon completion attendees will be able to:

  • Participate in rapid incremental data warehouse design
  • Establish realistic analytical requirements with business users
  • Understand the ETL processing required to successfully obtain, prepare and publish data in a dimensional data warehouse
  • Maximise the usability and performance of their data warehouse or data mart designs
  • Reference articles and template documents on-line that provide further support for the techniques covered

Contents

Dimensional Modelling Fundamentals

  • Data warehousing requirements and challenges
  • Modelling for measurement – the case for dimensional modelling
  • Star schema, snowflake schema, facts and dimensions
  • The four steps of dimensional modelling
  • Fact table types – transactional, periodic snapshots, accumulating snapshots
  • Fact additivity – additive, semi-additive and non-additive measures
  • Business dimension types, the 5Ws – Who, What, Where, When and Why
  • Calendar and Time dimensions
  • Degenerate dimensions
  • Dimensional attributes and hierarchies
  • Accurately reflecting history, supporting current (as is), historically correct (as was) and alternative (as at) analysis views – slowly changing dimensions
  • Modelling for change – using surrogate keys

Data Warehouse Design

  • Data marts vs. enterprise data warehouses
  • Dimensional Data Warehouse vs. Corporate Information Factory
  • Incremental data warehouse development using data marts – the Data Warehouse Bus Architecture, dimensional matrix
  • Data Warehouse reuse – conformed dimensions and facts, multi-role dimensions
  • Consolidated data marts

Dimensional Analysis

  • Gathering Analytical Requirements – asking the right questions
  • Identifying and documenting the relationships between business events, dimensions and users – data warehouse matrices
  • Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics – aggregation level, comparisons and query by exception
  • Identifying and classifying dimensional attributes and hierarchies – finding hidden data sources

Dimensional Modelling Patterns

  • Combining and separating dimensions
  • Flexible date handling, ad-hoc ranges and multiple simultaneous events
  • Dealing with Very Large Dimensions – Individual customers – mini dimensions, 'snowflaking' and hot-swappable dimensions
  • Customer relationship measurement – recency, frequency and intensity facts and dimensional attributes
  • Allocation problems – multi-valued dimensions, bridge tables, weighting factors, impact reports and 'correctly weighted' analysis
  • Supporting complex combination constraints – storing data as rows and columns, Bitmap dimensions
  • Ragged and volatile hierarchies – organization structures, bill of materials – using hierarchy maps to cope with recursive relationships and dynamic hierarchies
  • Modelling sequential behaviour – dimensional overloading, step dimensions, first and last analysis
  • Multinational support – national languages reporting, multi-currencies time zones and local calendars
  • Fact table performance optimization – indexing, partitioning and aggregation strategies

ETL Processes

  • Analysing and understanding source data – logical data mapping
  • Data quality, profiling, data validation and cleansing – presenting data quality and lineage metadata
  • Conforming heterogeneous data from multiple sources into standardized dimension tables and fact tables
  • Implementing slowly changing dimensions
  • High-performance surrogate key processing
  • ETL modules for multi-valued dimensions and hierarchical dimensions – building bridge table and hierarchy map loaders
  • Loading the three fundamental fact table types – transactional, periodic snapshot and accumulating snapshot
  • Handling late arriving data – dimensions and facts
  • Real-time ETL – moving from scheduled processing to continuous streaming, Capture Transform Flow (CTF), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), micro-batch ETL (MB ETL)
  • On-demand ETL – Enterprise Information Integration (EII), Ad-hoc query driven processing

Materials

In addition to the course material all students attending the master class may choose to receive a copy of:
The Data Warehouse Toolkit (Wiley 2002) Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross
or
The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (Wiley, 2004) Ralph Kimball and Joe Caserta

The Instructor

Lawrence Corr is a leading data warehouse design specialist and highly experienced trainer with over 20 years of industry experience in decision support and data analysis.
He has worked on numerous dimensional data warehouse projects in Europe, USA, Middle East and Africa. He has developed and reviewed data warehouses for clients within aerospace, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, engineering, broadcasting, financial services, retail and information technology.

DATE: 19 – 22 MAY 2008

VENUE: Lagoon Beach Hotel, Lagoon Beach Road, Milnerton, Cape Town.
www.lagoonbeachhotel.co.za

COST per delegate:

  • R12 400 - Early Bird Discount, if booked and paid before 25 March 2008
  • R13 000 - If booked after 25 March 2008
  • R12 300 - Group of 3 or more delegates from one company.
    Registration must take place at the same time. Early Bird Discount not applicable.


VAT Excluded. Terms and Conditions apply.

Click here to register online