Sunday, November 12, 2006

BI Suite EE - Some Key Points

  • The key differentiator for BI Suite EE is it's model-driven approach, which helps minimise requirements suprises as you develop the application
  • BI EE handles large data volumes through function shipping to the back-end DW database or OLAP server, rather than creating it's internal data stores and trying to scale those
  • The model-driven approach makes early prototyping easier - prototyping rather than a long requirements-writing process is the preferred development method, with a fully-functional prototype featuring role-based dashboards being delivered at the end
  • A typical BI EE project would involve the prototyping/requirements gathering phase, a performance tuning phase, regression testing and subsequent projects/iteration
  • When you build the Common Enterprise Information Model, make sure detail-level transaction data is kept in separate subject areas to aggregate, summary data, as mixing the two creates unusable presentation catalogs and bad query performance
  • Although BI EE supports the integration of data across data sources, this shouldn't be used as a way of creating a virtual data warehouse (EII) - this just doesn't work.
  • Understand the semantics of fact-based partitioning and logical table sources - by default every measure is a separate query block, but coalescing measure mappings in a single logical table source allows you to optimize by coalescing measures to reduce the number of queries
  • When implementing BI EE, resist the urge to rebuild the source data warehouse - instead create a handful of aggregates to speed up the slowest report, migrate these eventually to the source warehouses, use the caching and aggregate navigation features of EE to speed up the warehouse in-place.
  • When building analytics catalogs, keep to no more than seven top-level folders and seven columns per folder, minimize detailed columns (use navigation to access these instead), focus on adding measures and cross-fact calculations - this is where the value of EE is achieved, and use consistent order and naming - dimension folders at the top, measures at the bottom, and measure folders are named specifically so that end-users can distinguish between dims and measures.

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