Data Warehouse design process Top-down

Data Warehouse design process
Top-down, bottom-up or combined approach is used
? Top-down: Starts with overall design and planning. Useful where technology is mature and well known. ? Bottom-up: Starts with experiments and prototypes. Useful in the early stage of business modeling and technology development. ? Combined approach: Exploits the planned and strategic nature of top-down while retaining the rapid implementation of the bottom-up approach.
From software engineering point of view
? Waterfall method: structured and systematic analysis at each step before proceeding to the next ? Spiral method: rapid generation of increasingly functional systems, with short turnaround time.
Typical data warehouse design process
? Choose a business process to model, e.g., orders, sales, etc. ? Choose the grain (atomic level of data) of the business process ? Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record ? Choose the measure that will populate each fact table reco