Administration Guide

Warehousing Tasks

Creating a data warehouse involves the following tasks:

• Defining a subject area that identifies and groups the processes that you will use in your warehouse.
• Exploring the source data (or operational data), and defining warehouse sources.
• Creating a database to use as the warehouse, and defining warehouse targets.
• Specifying how to move and transform the source data into its format for the warehouse database by defining a process.
• Testing the steps that you have defined, and scheduling them to run automatically.
• Administering the warehouse by defining security, and monitoring database usage.
• Creating an information catalog of the data in the warehouse, if you have the DB2 Warehouse Manager package. An information catalog is a database that contains business metadata. The metadata helps users identify and locate data and information available to them in the organization. End users of the warehouse can search the catalog to determine which tables to query.
• Defining a star schema model for the data in the warehouse. A star schema is a specialized design that consists of multiple dimension tables (which describe aspects of a business) and one fact table (which contains the facts about the business). For example, if you manufacture soft-drinks, some dimension tables are products, markets, and time. The fact table contains transaction information about the products that are ordered in each region by season.
• Joining the fact table and dimension tables to combine details from the dimension tables with the order information. For example, you could join the product dimension with the fact table to add information about how each product was packaged to the orders.

You can learn more about these tasks and others by using the Business Intelligence Tutorial, viewing the DB2 Universal Database Quick Tour, or reading the Data Warehouse Center Administration Guide.