Business Intelligence Tutorial

Lesson 3. Browsing the source data

In this lesson, you will browse the source data that is available to you in the sample. You will investigate ways that you can transform this data into the star schema for the warehouse.

Source data is not always well structured for analysis and might need to be transformed to be more usable. The source data that you will be using consists of DB2 Universal Database tables and a text file. Some other typical types of source data are non-DB2 relational tables, MVS(TM) data sets, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. As you browse the data, look for relationships among the data and consider what information might be of the most interest to users.

In general, when you design a warehouse, you gather information about the operational data to use as input to the warehouse and the requirements for the warehouse data. The database administrator who is responsible for the operational data is a good source for information about the operational data. The business users who will be making business decisions based on the data in the warehouse are a good source for information about the requirements of the warehouse.


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