Importing/defining source metadata

Now that we've been introduced to the Design Center, it's time to make use of it to import or define our source metadata. Metadata is data that describes our data. We are going to tell the Warehouse Builder what our source data looks like and where it is located, so that it can build the code necessary to retrieve that data when we design and run mappings to populate our data warehouse. The metadata is represented in the Warehouse Builder as objects corresponding to the type of the source object. So if we're representing tables in a database, we will have tables defined in the Warehouse Builder.

We have a couple of options for defining the source metadata. We can manually input the definitions into Design Center Project Explorer ourselves, or we can choose to have the Warehouse Builder automatically import the descriptions of our data for us. As we like having the computer do the work for us whenever possible, we will choose the second option whenever...