Based on recent inquiries, many of you are in the midst of architecting (or rearchitecting) your data warehouse. There's no dispute that planning your data warehouse from an enterprise perspective is a good idea, but do you need an enterprise data warehouse? It depends on your definition. In this column, we'll clarify the similarities and differences between the two dominant approaches to enterprise warehousing.

Common Ground

We all agree on some things related to data warehousing. First, at the most rudimentary level, nearly all organizations benefit from creating a data warehouse and analytic environment to support decision-making. Maybe it's like asking your barber if you need a haircut, but personal bias aside, businesses profit from well-implemented data warehouses. No one would attempt to run a business without operational processes and systems in place. Likewise, complementary analytic processes and systems are needed to leverage the operational foundation.

Second, the goal of any data warehouse environment is to publish the "right" data and make it easily accessible to decision makers. The two primary components of this environment are staging and presentation. The staging (or acquisition) area consists of extract-transform-load (ETL) processes and support. Once the data is properly prepared, it is loaded into the presentation (or delivery) area where a variety of query, reporting, business intelligence, and analytic applications are used to probe, analyze, and present data in endless combinations.

Both approaches agree that it's prudent to embrace the enterprise vantage point when architecting the data warehouse environment for long-term integration and extensibility. Although subsets of the data warehouse will be implemented in phases over time, it's beneficial to begin with the integrated end goal in mind during planning.

Finally, standalone data marts or warehouses in Figure 1 are problematic. These independent silos are built to satisfy specific needs, without regard to other existing or planned analytic data. They tend to be departmental in nature, often loosely dimensionally structured. Although often perceived as the path of least resistance because no coordination is required, the independent approach is unsustainable in the long run. Multiple, uncoordinated extracts from the same operational sources are inefficient and wasteful. They generate similar, but different variations with inconsistent naming conventions and business rules. The conflicting results cause confusion, rework and reconciliation. In the end, decision-making based on independent data is often clouded by fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Figure 1 Independent data marts/warehouses.

So we all see eye to eye on some matters. Before turning to our differences of opinion, we'll review the two dominant approaches to enterprise data warehousing.

Kimball Bus Architecture

If you've been regularly reading the last 100 or so columns, you're familiar with the Kimball approach in Figure 2. As we described in our last column "Data Warehouse Dining Experience" (Jan. 1, 2004), raw data is transformed into presentable information in the staging area, ever mindful of throughput and quality. Staging begins with coordinated extracts from the operational source systems. Some staging "kitchen" activities are centralized, such as maintenance and storage of common reference data, while others may be distributed.

Figure 2 Dimensional data warehouse.

The presentation area is dimensionally structured, whether centralized or distributed. A dimensional model contains the same information as a normalized model, but packages it for ease-of-use and query performance. It includes both atomic detail and summarized information (aggregates in relational tables or multidimensional cubes) as required for performance or geographic distribution of the data. Queries descend to progressively lower levels of detail, without reprogramming by the user or application designer.

Dimensional models are built by business process (corresponding to a business measurement or event), not business departments. For example, orders data is populated once in the dimensional data warehouse for enterprise access, rather than being replicated in three departmental marts for marketing, sales, and finance. Once foundation business processes are available in the warehouse, consolidated dimensional models deliver cross-process metrics. The enterprise data warehouse bus matrix identifies and enforces the relationships between business process metrics (facts) and descriptive attributes (dimensions).

Corporate Information Factory

Figure 3 illustrates the Corporate Information Factory (CIF) approach, once known as the EDW approach. Like the Kimball approach, there are coordinated extracts from the source systems. From there, a third normal form (3NF) relational database containing atomic data is loaded. This normalized data warehouse is used to populate additional presentation data repositories, including special-purpose warehouses for exploration and data mining, as well as data marts.

Figure 3 Normalized data warehouse with summary dimensional marts (CIF).

In this scenario, the marts are tailored by business department/function with dimensionally structured summary data. Atomic data is accessible via the normalized data warehouse. Obviously, the atomic data is structured very differently from summarized information.