Chapter 1, Defining a Program, assesses your current project delivery methodology to identify areas that may need enhancing to support your business intelligence initiative.

Chapter 2, Establishing the Project, reviews and enhances the project delivery phases in order to define a consistent set of work practices for the delivery of a successful project.

Chapter 3, Controlling the Project, focuses on communication and control, essential to a business intelligence project. Developing efficient and effective ways to do this is the key aim of this chapter.

Chapter 4, Wrapping Up the Project, focuses on business intelligence projects that continue for numerous iterations, understanding the information that needs to flow from project to project. Setting up ways to hand over that information is key to the long term success of the solution.

Chapter 5, The Blueprint, journeys a roadmap needed to guide one from the start to the destination, for a business intelligence and data warehouse solution.

Chapter 6, Analyzing the Requirements, talks of succinctly capturing and understanding the requirements of a project. Keeping requirements simple and providing transparency is key to demystifying the project for stakeholders.

Chapter 7, Architecture and Design, focuses on creating a successful foundation to interactively build your solution, which can save large amounts of time and money. Getting the basics right is the topic of this chapter.

Chapter 8, Analyzing the Sources, talks about identifying the right source with the most correct information, which is essential to the success of the project. Gaining a deeper understanding of your source systems will enable you to make intelligent decisions in determining which system contains the most accurate information for the subject area.

Chapter 9, Analyzing the Data, talks about how data profiling or data discovery can uncover a wealth of information. Identifying efficient ways and methods to interrogate information will unlock some of this wealth.

Chapter 10, Constructing the Data Model, talks about the Data Model, which is the key asset of the project. Understanding how to effectively design and develop this model enables organizations to reuse this asset many times.

Chapter 11, Defining the ETL/ELT, focuses on building an efficient framework and extraction, transformation, and loading routines, which leads to a simpler and easier-to-manage solution.

Chapter 12, Enhancing the Data, provides information about the data gaps normally existing within organizations. Once identified, effective means to capture and contribute information into the solution are required.

Chapter 13, Optimizing the Access, gives an insight into understanding the key technological capabilities within your reporting tool, allowing you to deliver information to your stakeholders in a meaningful and accurate way.

Chapter 14, Security, provides information on business intelligence and data warehouse solution security. This chapter focuses on showing you how to integrate common industrial security technology and requirements into your solution.

This book covers the product suite from Oracle, to design and build a data warehouse. The softwares that are needed to support the recipes are as follows:

Additional products to support the project are as follows:

If you are a project manager or IT professional looking to manage, design, and develop a data warehouse and business intelligence solution, then this is the best guide for you.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The table hier_balanced is a balanced hierarchy and the table hier_ragged is a ragged hierarchy".

A block of code is set as follows:

select hier, count(*) from (
SELECT LPAD(' ', level*2, ' ') || col2 as hier
FROM hier_ragged
START WITH col1 = 'Root'
CONNECT BY PRIOR col2 = col1)
group by hier
having count(*) > 1;

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "View Connection Information, and click on Edit to update it".

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