For this lesson, you must have the Warehouse Manager package to install the Information Catalog Manager, which runs on Windows NT, Windows 95, and Windows 98. You also must have defined the dimension tables and fact table in Defining the rest of the tables for the star schema (optional).
In this lesson, you will catalog the data in your data warehouse for use by end users. You catalog the data by publishing Data Warehouse Center metadata in an information catalog. An information catalog is the set of tables managed by the Information Catalog Manager that contains business metadata that helps users identify and locate data and information available to them in the organization. Users can search the information catalog to find the tables that contain the data that they need to query.
Publishing metadata is the process of transferring metadata from the Data Warehouse Center to the Information Catalog Manager. In this lesson, you will publish the metadata for the Market process that you created in Lesson 8, Defining data transformation and movement. When you publish the process, you will publish the metadata for the following objects that are contained in the process: