[Cindy moved from Off-Topic to General Discussion]
Hello everyone.
Im after some advice. I work for a charity therefore budgets are VERY tight and it means I never I get any training . Therefore Im reliant on teaching myself, using books or any other resource I can find.
At the moment Im trying to teach myself ‘Data warehouse design’ and Ive just finished reading Ralph Kimball’s book ‘The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Complete guide to dimensional modeling’.
I now want to try and build a small data warehouse now on my home PC using Access and applying the principles from Kimball’s book. However
Ive got to issues I need some help on.
I need data to build a dw on I was thinking of using one of the universes / data that comes with BO i.e efashion etc. Do you think I would be able to build a DW from one of this pre-supplied data.
I need some kind of ETL tool, is there anything free I could get hold either a demo version of something or something thats just free.
Any advice on my ‘home dw’ project would be most appreciated.
We got a free cd from a company called Data Junction - I can’t vouch for how good the product was or even if its still available…but if you do enough looking on the internet you will find a free download or order a cd option. I think it was a 30 day trial we got.
If it is a charity (non profit org) why don’t you approach some software vendors and ask them for free trial periods of their software? It might be worth a try…
I will probably get flamed or worse for this post but I take the risk.
If you need something FREE (I did not say good)
You can PLAY around with MTS from Microsoft SQL Server.
I admit it is not the best Tool on the market it is lousy if you have to maintain it in a production environment and about 1000 more reasons.
But it is part of SQL server “Free” if you have MSDN, …
It can be some good practice and then you can always look for a trial product once you know what you get your self into and what you are trying to achieve.
My personal opinion would be that you stick with building a warehouse model first. The population of that model will come much later in the process, only after you have identified your source systems. Even if you have an ETL tool at this time, you would have to build several fake source systems in order to fully use it.
It has been my experience that you can fully utilize a warehouse model long before your ETL routines have been defined. More important than defining the ETL routines would be to make sure that your dimensional model supports your reporting needs!
I also believe that if you download and install some of the new versions of Oracle (which are free downloads with registration at OTN.ORACLE.COM and also great for learning on your own), you can install some of the “sample” databases.
Depending on the version that you install, you can choose the type of database you’d like and get the sample files associated to that type (transactional vs. datawarehousing, etc…)
I wrote a very rough ‘data generator’ tool using Access (I think it was Access 97 - none of this OO stuff, it used good old functions and procedures!) - it generates data based on a retail chain, so it has products, stores, customers etc - if you would like it then let me know your e-mail address and I’ll forward it on. Let me know what version of Access you have aswell - I think it works for 97 and 2000.
. Therefore Im reliant on teaching myself, using books or any other resource I can find.
(BOB member since 2002-12-16)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
around with MTS from Microsoft SQL Server.
(BOB member since 2003-09-22)