Unit – 2

Planning and implementing a data warehouse involves specialized considerations compared

to traditional warehousing. Here's a tailored guide:
1. Define Business Objectives: Clearly define the business objectives for the data
warehouse, such as improving decision-making, enabling advanced analytics, enhancing
reporting capabilities, or supporting regulatory compliance.
2. Understand Data Requirements: Identify the types of data that need to be stored in the
data warehouse to support the business objectives. This includes structured data from
operational systems, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data from sources like social
media, IoT devices, and external data providers.
3. Data Modelling and Schema Design: Design the data model and schema for the data
warehouse to organize and structure the data effectively. Consider dimensio nal modelling
techniques such as star schema or snowflake schema, which are optimized for analytical
querying and reporting.
4. Data Integration: Plan how data will be extracted, transformed, and loaded (ETL) into the
data warehouse from various source systems. Develop ETL processes to cleanse, transform,
and integrate data from disparate sources while maintaining data quality and consistency.
5. Scalability and Performance: Consider scalability and performance requirements for the
data warehouse, especially if dealing with large volumes of data or complex queries. Design
the data warehouse architecture to scale horizontally or vertically as needed, and implement
performance optimization techniques such as indexing, partitioning, and query optimization.
6. Data Governance and Security: Establish data governance policies and procedures to
ensure the quality, integrity, and security of the data in the warehouse. Implement access
controls, encryption, auditing, and compliance measures to protect sensitive data and ensure
regulatory compliance.
7. Metadata Management: Develop a metadata management strategy to catalog and manage
metadata (data about the data) within the data warehouse. This includes documenting data
definitions, lineage, transformations, and relationships to facilitate data discovery,
understanding, and governance.
8. User Access and Reporting: Define user access roles and permissions within the data
warehouse to control who can access and manipulate the data. Provide tools and interfaces
for users to query, analyse, and visualize data, such as BI tools, ad-hoc query tools, and
dashboards.
9. Testing and Quality Assurance: Test the data warehouse thoroughly to ensure that data is
loaded correctly, transformations are applied accurately, and queries return expected results.
Develop test cases and scripts to validate data integrity, completeness, and accuracy.
10. Training and Change Management: Provide training and support for users and
stakeholders to understand how to use the data warehouse effectively. Implement change
management processes to manage updates, enhancements, and changes to the data warehouse
over time.
11. Monitoring and Maintenance: Establish monitoring and maintenance procedures to
monitor the health, performance, and usage of the data warehouse. Monitor data loads, query
performance, storage usage, and system resources to identify issues and optimize
performance.
12. Continuous Improvement: Foster a culture of continuous improvement within the data
warehouse team. Encourage feedback from users and stakeholders, and use performance
metrics and analytics to identify areas for optimization and enhancement.
By following these steps, organizations can effectively plan and implement a data warehouse
that meets their business objectives, provides valuable insights and analytics, and supports
data-driven decision-making across the organization.
Selecting the appropriate hardware and operating system (OS) for a data warehouse is
crucial for ensuring optimal performance, scalability, reliability, and security. Here are some
considerations for choosing hardware and operating systems for a data warehouse:

1. Hardware Requirements :
a. Processing Power: Choose servers with sufficient processing power to handle the
computational demands of data processing, transformation, and analytics. Multi-core
processors, such as Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC CPUs, are commonly used for data
warehousing.
b. Memory (RAM): Data warehouses often benefit from large amounts of RAM to store
frequently accessed data in memory, reducing disk I/O and improving query performance.
Consider servers with ample RAM capacity, typically ranging from tens to hundreds of
gigabytes or even terabytes.
c. Storage: Opt for high-performance storage solutions to accommodate large volumes of
data and support fast read and write operations. This may include solid-state drives (SSDs)
for high-speed data access or network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks
(SANs) for scalable and redundant storage.
d. Network Connectivity: Ensure that the servers have sufficient network bandwidth and
connectivity to handle data transfer between the data warehouse and source systems, as well
as between nodes in distributed architectures.
e. Scalability: Choose hardware that allows for easy scalability to accommodate future
growth in data volume and user workload. Consider architectures such as scale-out
(horizontal scaling) or scale-up (vertical scaling) depending on the anticipated scalability
requirements.
2. Operating System (OS):
a. Compatibility: Select an operating system that is compatible with the database
management system (DBMS) or data warehouse platform you plan to use. Common choices
include Linux distributions (e.g., Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu) and Windows
Server.
b. Performance: Choose an OS known for stability, performance, and reliability in enterprise
environments. Linux distributions are often preferred for their performance, scalability, and
robustness in handling data-intensive workloads.
c. Security: Consider security features and capabilities provided by the OS, such as access
controls, encryption, audit logging, and security patches and updates. Ensure compliance with
industry standards and regulations related to data security and privacy.
d. Manageability: Evaluate the ease of management and administration of the chosen OS,
including tools for monitoring, troubleshooting, and system management. Choose an OS with
robust management capabilities to simplify operational tasks and minimize downtime.
e. Licensing and Cost: Consider the licensing costs associated with the OS, as well as any
additional costs for support, maintenance, and updates. Evaluate the total cost of ownership
(TCO) over the lifetime of the data warehouse solution.

3. Virtualization and Cloud Options:

a. Virtualization: Consider deploying the data warehouse on virtualized infrastructure using
hypervisor technologies such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or open-source
solutions like KVM and Xen. Virtualization provides flexibility, resource isolation, and
scalability.
b. Cloud Platforms: Evaluate cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for hosting your data warehouse. Cloud
platforms offer scalable compute and storage resources, managed services for data
warehousing, and pay-as-you-go pricing models. Ultimately, the choice of hardware and
operating system for a data warehouse depends on factors such as performance requirements,
scalability needs, budget constraints, existing infrastructure, and organizational preferences.
It's essential to carefully evaluate these factors and consider future growth and technology
trends when making decisions about hardware and OS for your data warehouse. Additionally,
consulting with IT professionals or solution architects experienced in data warehousing can
help ensure that you make informed decisions aligned with your business objectives.
Client/server computing and data warehousing are closely related concepts, as client/server
architecture is often used in the implementation of data warehouse systems. Let's explore
how these two concepts intersect:

1. Client/Server Computing Model:

 In client/server computing, the architecture divides processing tasks between two types of
nodes: clients and servers.
 Clients are user devices (such as desktop computers, laptops, tablets, or smartphones) that
request and display information from servers.
 Servers are powerful computers or server clusters that store, process, and manage data and
applications. Servers respond to client requests by performing the necessary processing and
returning results.
 The client/server model allows for distributed computing, where tasks are distributed across
multiple computers, improving scalability, performance, and resource utilization.
2. Data Warehousing:
 A data warehouse is a centralized repository of integrated and structured data from one or
more disparate sources. It is designed for querying, analysis, and reporting to support
decision-making processes within an organization.
 Data warehouses typically store historical and aggregated data over time, providing a
comprehensive view of business operations and performance.
 Data warehouse systems involve complex data modelling, ETL (extract, transform, load)
processes to integrate data from multiple sources, and querying and reporting tools for data
analysis and visualization.
 Data warehouses support various analytical tasks, including business intelligence, data
mining, trend analysis, forecasting, and ad-hoc querying.

3. Client/Server Architecture in Data Warehousing:

 Data warehouse systems often adopt a client/server architecture to facilitate data access and
analysis.
 Clients, such as desktop-based BI (business intelligence) tools, reporting applications, or
web-based dashboards, interact with the data warehouse server to request and retrieve data
for analysis and reporting purposes.
 The data warehouse server hosts the data warehouse repository and associated services,
such as data loading, storage management, query processing, and security enforcement.
 Clients send SQL queries or analytical requests to the data warehouse server, which
processes the requests, retrieves data from the underlying database, performs necessary
transformations and calculations, and returns the results to the clients for display or further
analysis.
4. Benefits of Client/Server Architecture in Data Warehousing:
 Scalability: Client/server architecture allows for scalable deployment of data warehouse
systems, with the ability to add more clients and servers as needed to handle increasing data
volumes and user concurrency.
 Performance: By distributing processing tasks between clients and servers, client/server
architecture can improve system performance and response times, especially for complex
analytical queries and reporting tasks.
 Centralized Management: Data warehouse servers provide centralized management of data
and resources, enabling administrators to control access, monitor performance, and enforce
security policies from a central location. Overall, the client/server computing model plays a
significant role in the implementation and operation of data warehouse systems, enabling
efficient data access, analysis, and reporting for decision-making purposes within
organizations. Parallel processing and cluster systems are crucial components in data
warehousing, especially for handling large volumes of data and complex analytical workloads
efficiently. Let's delve into each concept and their role in data warehousing:
1. Parallel Processing:
 Parallel processing involves dividing a computational task into smaller sub-tasks that can be
executed simultaneously on multiple processing units (processors or cores). This approach
significantly reduces the time required to process large datasets and complex computations.
 In data warehousing, parallel processing is used to accelerate data loading, transformation,
querying, and analysis tasks. These tasks often involve processing large volumes of data
across multiple dimensions and aggregating results from various sources.
 Parallel processing techniques include:
 Parallel data loading: Distributing data loading tasks across multiple nodes or threads to
ingest data into the data warehouse in parallel.
 Parallel query execution: Breaking down SQL queries into parallelizable tasks and
executing them concurrently across multiple processors or nodes.

 Parallel data transformation: Distributing data transformation tasks, such as joins, filtering,
and aggregation, across parallel processing units to improve performance.
 Parallel processing can be implemented using shared-memory architectures (symmetric
multiprocessing, SMP), distributed- memory architectures (massively parallel processing,
MPP), or hybrid approaches.
2. Cluster Systems:
 A cluster system is a collection of interconnected computers (nodes) that work together to
perform computational tasks. Cluster systems are designed for parallel processing, fault
tolerance, and scalability.
 In data warehousing, cluster systems are used to build distributed data warehouse
architectures that can scale horizontally to handle large datasets and high query loads.
 Types of cluster systems used in data warehousing include:

 Shared-nothing architecture: Each node in the cluster has its own memory and storage, and
data is partitioned across nodes. This architecture enables high scalability and performance
by distributing data and processing tasks across multiple nodes. abutting data and processing
tasks across multiple nodes. This ensures that the data warehouse remains operational even if
individual nodes fail.
 Cost-Effectiveness: Parallel processing and cluster systems can be built using commodity
hardware and open-source software, making them cost-effective solutions for building
scalable and high-performance data warehouse environments. In summary, parallel
processors and cluster systems play a critical role in data warehousing by enabling high-
performance, scalable, and fault-tolerant architectures for processing and analysing large
volumes of data efficiently. These technologies are essential for meeting the demands of
modern data-driven organizations and supporting advanced analytics, business intelligence,
and decision-making processes. Distributed Database Management Systems (DDBMS) play a
significant role in data warehousing, especially for handling large volumes of data across
distributed environments efficiently. Here's an overview of distributed DBMS
implementations in the context of data warehousing:
1. Horizontal Partitioning:
 Horizontal partitioning, also known as shading, involves dividing a database table into
multiple partitions (or shards) based on a partitioning key.
 In a distributed data warehouse, horizontal partitioning distributes data across multiple
nodes or servers based on predefined criteria (e.g., ranges of values, hash functions, or
specific attributes)
 Consider partitioning large fact tables to improve query performance, manage data
distribution, and facilitate data loading and maintenance operations.
8. Normalization and Demoralization:
 Strike a balance between normalization and demoralization based on the organization's
analytical requirements, query patterns, and performance considerations.
 Normalize data to eliminate redundancy and maintain data integrity, especially in
dimension tables with hierarchical or complex relationships.

 Demoralize data to simplify queries, reduce join operations, and improve query
performance, especially in fact tables and frequently accessed dimensions.
9. Data Quality and Consistency:
 Implement data quality checks and validation rules to ensure data consistency and integrity
throughout the warehouse.
 Incorporate data cleansing and transformation processes to standardize and clean incoming
data from various sources.
 Establish data governance policies and procedures to maintain data quality standards and
enforce data integrity rules.
10. Flexibility and Adaptability:
 Design the warehouse schema to be flexible and adaptable to evolving business
requirements and analytical needs.
 Use techniques such as schema evolution, agile modelling, and iterative development to
accommodate changes and enhancements over time.
 Plan for scalability and performance optimization to handle increasing data volumes and
user concurrency as the warehouse grows. By carefully designing the warehouse schema
based on these considerations and best practices, organizations can create a robust foundation
for their data warehouse that supports efficient querying, analysis, and reporting for informed
decision-making and strategic insights.