This section of the chapter will lead you through the design and build process for the small warehouse (often referred to as a data mart) used for the reporting examples in the following chapters of this book.
For this book, we have taken the Microsoft AdventureWorks sample system, which already includes a warehouse schema for reporting.
Therefore, in this next section I will use a theoretical tennis statistic reporting system to show you the steps involved in designing a data warehouse.
The first step is to assess each source system table for its type of data in order to determine if it fits into a Dimension table, a Fact table, or another table type. Based upon our assessment of the source tables, we can then design and build the warehouse tables. This is followed by the creation of a process to copy the data from the source to the warehouse. Finally, we review and tune the database in order to ensure that we can meet the goals we have set.