Preliminary analysis
In any data warehouse project, we are going to need to do some up-front analysis to determine what data will need to be captured into our warehouse. The analysis will tell us where the data is located, and in what format, so that we can begin to define our source data structures in the Warehouse Builder. In our case, we will presume that we have interviewed the management at the ACME Toys and Gizmos company and they have indicated the following:
The high-priority information that they would like to see from this data warehouse project is sales-related data for all their stores
They don't have an idea about the comparative sales in the various stores, so they need some way to view all that data together to do an analysis that shows how well, or poorly, the stores are doing
In the future, they would also like to be able to compare store sales with their web site sales, but that will not be required for this first data warehouse we build
We are doing a very simple analysis...
