10.2. Data Warehouse Design

The database serves as the foundation of the business intelligence infrastructure: it is the place where the data is stored. But there is more to business intelligence than data—the infrastructure becomes useful only when business users use the data to gain insight. This may seem like a trivial point, but we've seen numerous companies build elegant infrastructure without consulting business users to determine business needs or key performance indicators (KPIs) to be measured. Often, such deployed projects end up supporting very few users, generate little activity, and little business intelligence is gained.

Assuming that your infrastructure is well planned and there is a demand for the data, your next challenge will be to figure out how to handle the demand. You will be faced with the need to design your data warehouse and other infrastructure components to deliver appropriate performance to your users—performance that may initially seem far beyond your capabilities, since the information needed can involve comparisons of massive amounts of detailed data.