Data Warehouse Subsystem

part of the ArsDigita Community System by Philip Greenspun
Most of the real work in building a data warehouse is constructing a dimensional data model and copying information from your online transaction processing (OLTP) data model into the dimensional model. This software won't help you with that. Although I hope to some day write about this, for now I will simply refer you to Ralph Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit.

What this subsystem is designed to do is provide a reasonable user interface to ad hoc querying of a single table. If you have multiple tables that need to be JOINed, you could either extend this software a bit or build a view that does the JOIN. If you have a truly large database (gigabytes), you might find that performance isn't acceptable. In that case, what you need to do is

Once you've gotten your data into a dimensional model (one fact table plus a bunch of dimension tables), the data warehousing module of the ACS can help you. It is also potentially useful if you just want to provide ad-hoc query capabilities for a big table that happens to exist in your production database.

The assumption is that this module will keep you from having to buy, install, and maintain Seagate Crystal Reports (a truly painful-to-use product).

Installation

You will almost surely want to go into /tcl/dw-defs.tcl and change dw_table_name to return either the right table or view for this system or something that depends on which user is logged in.
philg@mit.edu