Business Intelligence Tutorial

Testing warehouse steps

In this lesson, you will populate the LOOKUP_MARKET table by running the steps that you created in Defining data transformation and movement:

You will then verify the results of running them.

Before you run the steps, you must promote them to test mode. Up to this point, the steps you created were in development mode. In development mode, you can change any of the specifications for the step. When you promote the step to test mode, the Data Warehouse Center creates the target table for the step. Therefore, after you promote a step to test mode, you can make only those changes that are not destructive to the target table. For example, you can add columns to a target table when its associated step is in test mode, but you cannot remove columns from the target table.

After you promote the steps to test mode, you will run each step individually. In a later lesson, you will specify that the steps run in sequence.


Testing the Load Demographics Data step

In this exercise, you will promote and run the Load Demographics Data step. Then you will promote the rest of the steps in the Build Tutorial Market Dimension process.

To promote the Load Demographics Data step:

  1. From the Process Model window for the Build Tutorial Market Dimension process, right-click the Load Demographics Data step.
  2. Click Mode-> Test.

    The Data Warehouse Center starts to create the target table, and displays a progress window. Wait until the Data Warehouse Center finishes processing before you start the next procedure.

    A lock appears on the step icon to indicate that only non-destructive changes can be made to the step.

To verify that the Demographics target table was created:

  1. If the Control Center is not open, then from the main Data Warehouse Center window, click Tools -> Control Center to open the DB2 Control Center.
  2. Expand the object tree until you see TUTWHS, the warehouse database that you created in Creating a warehouse database.
  3. Expand the TUTWHS database tree.
  4. Click the Tables folder.

    A list of tables displays in the right panel of the window.

  5. Verify that the DEMOGRAPHICS_TARGET table is there.

    If you are looking in the Control Center, right-click the Tables folder and click Refresh to refresh the list of tables in the right panel.

To test the Load Demographics Data step:

  1. From the Process Model window for the Build Tutorial Market Dimension, right-click the Load Demographics Data step.
  2. Click Test.

To verify the results of the step's processing:

  1. From the DB2 Control Center, right-click the DEMOGRAPHICS_TARGET table.
  2. Click Sample Contents.

    The DB2 Control Center displays a subset of the data in the table.

  3. Click Close.

Repeat the steps in this lesson for the Select Geographies Data step and the Join Market Data step. The target table for the Select Geographies Data step is GEOGRAPHIES_TARGET. The target table for the Join Market Data step is LOOKUP_MARKET.


Promoting the rest of the steps in the star schema (optional)

To create the rest of the tables in the star schema, you must promote the steps that you created in Defining the rest of the tables for the star schema (optional). This section is optional, but if you do not complete the steps in this section, you will not be able to do the following lessons:

If you want to skip this section, go to Scheduling warehouse processes.

To promote the steps, open the process that contains the steps, and follow the procedure in step 1 through 5. You are not required to test the remaining steps.

Promote the following steps:
Tutorial Process Tutorial Step Warehouse Database Target Table
Build Tutorial Product Dimension Tutorial Select Product TUTWHS LOOKUP_PRODUCT
Build Tutorial Time Dimension Tutorial Select Time TUTWHS LOOKUP_TIME
Build Tutorial Scenario Dimension Tutorial Select Scenario TUTWHS LOOKUP_SCENARIO
Build Tutorial Fact Table Tutorial Fact Table Join TUTWHS FACT_TABLE


What you just did

In this lesson, you promoted the Load Demographics Data, Select Geographies Data, and Join Market Data steps to test mode. Then you ran them to test them. In Scheduling warehouse processes, you will schedule these steps to run automatically.


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