Dimensional data warehousing is now accepted as a valuable business tool and is not fringe technology, says UK-based business intelligence (BI) consultant Lawrence Corr.
Corr, principal consultant for DecisionOne Consulting, says there has been a move away from specialist data warehousing databases now that Oracle, DB2 and others have dimensional data warehousing elements.
Corr was in SA last week with fellow BI specialist, Joe Caserta, to hold an Alicornio Africa-sponsored master class in dimensional data warehouse development, design and ETL (extraction, transformation, loading).
He says there are essentially two camps on designing data warehouses - the entity-relationship approach and the dimensional approach.
"Basically it`s the old way and the new way," he says. "The new way is dimensional data warehousing, which is synonymous with [data warehousing guru] Ralph Kimball."
The dimensional approach, instead of simply measuring data across the business, breaks the business down and prioritises what is worth measuring.
"The real benefit is that you have the technique to get deliverables very quickly and to get data into the hands of information-starved management," says Corr.
SA companies have been eager to adopt the dimensional approach, which he says comes from an earlier visit by Kimball to the country.
"In many respects SA is ahead of many other countries where he didn`t visit," he comments.
"Dimensional data warehousing used to be expensive, but now the technology is available. The standard databases are there and they support the dimensional approach. So we used to have to do a lot of convincing, but not any more."
However, for the true business value of dimensional data warehousing to be realised, it has to be a business-IT partnership, he says.
"Business people need to take ownership and guide the project. The quick win comes from that partnership. It`s not all about storing data, but what the important measures in the business are at this time."
He says there is a need to include this approach in the curriculum at tertiary education level..
"There are still some US-based data warehousing gurus pushing the earlier approaches," he adds.
In SA, however, Alicornio Africa has been engaging with the tertiary institutions and MD Susan Andre says the response has been positive.
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