DATA WAREHOUSING FUNDAMENTALS: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Professionals

4.3. THE DATA WAREHOUSE PROJECT

As an IT professional, you have worked on application projects before. You know what goes on in these projects and are aware of the methods needed to build the applications from planning through implementation. You have been part of the analysis, the design, the programming, or the testing phases. If you have functioned as a project manager or a team leader, you know how projects are monitored and controlled. A project is a project. If you have seen one IT project, have you not seen them all?

The answer in not a simple yes or no. Data warehouse projects are different from projects building the transaction processing systems. If you are new to data warehousing, your first data warehouse project will reveal the major differences. We will discuss these differences and also consider ways to react to them. We will also ask a basic question about the readiness of the IT and user departments to launch a data warehouse project. How about the traditional system development life cycle (SDLC) approach? Can we use this approach to data warehouse projects as well? If so, what are the development phases in the life cycle?

Figure 4-1. Overall plan for data warehousing initiative.

4.3.1. How is it Different?

Let us understand why data warehouse projects are distinctive. You are familiar with application projects for OLTP systems. A comparison with an OLTP application ...