The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

Chapter 4. Setup and Physical Design

Where the rubber meets the road

Up to this point, we've been talking about project management, business requirements, logical data models, and system architectures. Until now, you haven't needed an instance of SQL Server 2005 installed in your organization. That changes in this chapter, as we discuss issues surrounding the setup of your development, test, and production systems, and get you ready to start the development process.

As you can see in Figure 4.1, the physical design issues addressed in this chapter fall squarely in the middle of the Data Track of the Business Dimensional Lifecycle.

We begin by helping you get a handle on the size of your business intelligence system, so you can make decisions about its basic physical configuration. Will you install all the server software components for your DW/BI system on a single machine or several? Will you use clustering or web farms? Do you need to budget for 64-bit hardware or expensive storage networks? We can't answer these questions for you, but we've provided some guidance that should help you answer them for yourself.

The decisions you make about your production hardware and software configuration should be reflected, as much as economically feasible, in your test or quality assurance system. It may seem wasteful to spend money on test systems, but if you're serious about delivering good-quality service to your existing business users, you need to be serious about testing before you ...