The Data Warehouse Workshop

Course Description
StarSoft Solutions offers a three day training workshop as an introduction to data warehouse and decision support system design, targeted for a general IS audience. This workshop reviews the design of large scale decision support systems from the perspective of a number of related industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, durable goods manufacturing, health care, banking, insurance and financial services.

The goal of the workshop is to empower the attendees to be able to begin to design their own data warehouse after attending the course. A good design is a simple design, but the designer must expect to work hard to achieve a simple design. This is the underlying philosophy of the class.

Who Should Attend
This course is primarily intended for a technical audience, including application developers, project managers, database administrators and data modelers. The course is invaluable for those responsible for the actual design of the data warehouse. In addition, it is beneficial for the other IS team members to understand fundamental data warehouse concepts even if they are not directly responsible for the design.

Course Outline

DAY 1
• Introduction to the Business Dimensional Lifecycle™
• Business Rationale for a Data Warehouse
• Introduction To The Star Schema
• The Database Design Process
• Detailed Schema Design
• Semi-additive facts
• Shared Dimensions
• Multiple Fact Tables
• Slowly Changing Dimensions
• Factless Fact Tables

DAY 2
• Team Exercise #1 - Detailed Design
• Data Warehouse Architecture
• Data Staging Process
• Aggregation In Depth
• Performance Tuning Approach

DAY 3
• Team Exercise 2 - Data Mart Design
• The Business Dimensional Model™
• Variations of Star Schemas
• Data Access Tool Architectures
• Characteristics of Data Warehouse Access
• An Introduction to Data Mining
• Open Forum For Discussion

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