Warehouse Source

Use the Warehouse Source notebook to define a new warehouse source or to edit an existing warehouse source for your data warehouse. Warehouse sources are integral to the data warehousing process. The data contained within warehouse source tables, view, and files is input to the transformation steps that ultimately result in the warehouse target tables. The data in the warehouse target tables is then used to make business decisions.

Before you define the warehouse source, you must verify that the database or file exists and that you can connect to it. If the database or file do not exist, you must create them outside of the Data Warehouse Center. For example, to create a DB2 UDB database, go to the Control Center and follow the steps for creating a database. Once the database is created, you must catalog it with ODBC. Once you return to the Data Warehouse Center, you can then define the database as a warehouse source.

If you are using an agent other than the AS/400 agent, you must supply the system data source name (DSN) by which the database is registered in ODBC on the agent site. Use the ODBC applet, accessible from the Windows NT Control Panel, to add the data source as a system data source. If you are using the AS/400 agent, you must supply the name of the database as it is registered in the remote database directory on the AS/400 agent site.

From this notebook you can:

Define a warehouse source to the Data Warehouse Center.
Define the access that the agent site has to the warehouse source.
Specify how to access flat file warehouse sources.
Select a database the warehouse source will access.
Specify the interval in which to retry a data extract.
Select tables to access from the warehouse source.
Define which warehouse group can access the warehouse source.

Requirement: The Data Warehouse Center supports only warehouse source tables that use ordinary SQL identifiers. An ordinary identifier:

Must start with a letter.
Can include uppercase letters, number, and underscore characters.
Cannot be a reserved word.

If a table has a lowercase letter as part of its ordinary identifier, the Data Warehouse Center stores the lowercase letter as an uppercase letter.

The Data Warehouse Center does not support warehouse source tables that use delimited identifiers. A delimited identifier:

Is enclosed within double quotation marks.
Can include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, underscores, and spaces.
Can contain a double quotation mark, represented by two consecutive quotation marks.

If you are using a table that uses a delimited identifier in your warehouse source, the Data Warehouse Center cannot provide samples of the data from the table. The Data Warehouse Center cannot promote a step that uses a warehouse source that has a delimited identifier.