Get started with an Active Data Warehousing checklist. http://www.teradata.com/t/AEI-Starter-Kit/Getting-Started/

1. Checklist ‐‐ Getting Started with Active Data Warehousing
How to Get an Active Data Warehouse Project Started
Many of us see the vision and the business value of Active Data Warehousingtm. Yet many of
our peers are unable to see beyond the everyday problems and tasks that challenge them. So
how can we help our organization get more value out of the data warehouse? This checklist
summarizes key points for getting started with an Active Data Warehousetm (ADW). It is
intentionally not comprehensive or complete. It is a high level list of tasks to consider doing to
get the first project started.
Some tasks in this checklist can be done by a programmer while other tasks must be done by
an IT Director. An IT Director with good negotiation skills is needed to persuade senior
managers in IT and the line of business that this new strategy can produce business benefits
without high costs or high risk.
Recruiting Line of Business Managers Support
Typically line-of-business management embraces Active Data Warehousingtm quickly. They
have often wanted to use "today's data today" instead of "yesterday's data today". Performing
some or all of these tasks will help teach what is possible with an ADW. The goal is to get
executive support for a few Active projects. Here are some of the ways to get started:
 Task Description
Educate yourself on Collect Active Data Warehouse business examples in your industry
ADW business value and some from outside your industry. This will help provide money
examples. making ideas for your peers.
Send magazine articles or case studies to line of business managers
Send Active articles to so they can see themselves what others have accomplished. Send
several line of an article every few weeks since they cannot absorb it all at once.
business decision It's a bad choice to send all the articles all at once -- information
makers. Do this every overload will get ignored. When sending articles, it always helps to
3-4 weeks. ask questions like "Would this be useful in our company? Why or
why not?"
These organizations are often the first adopters of active applications.
It's often useful to simply watch these organizations do their work for
a few hours to understand their challenges. Consistently, there areas
Visit the Call Center,
where data from the data warehouse can help make their job easier
Marketing, or Web site or more productive. Look for new uses of data that is already in the
Manager data warehouse. Probe the business managers for their ideas on
ways near real time analytic or integrated information could increase
the value of their operations.
Teradata has business consultants that specialize by industry and
know what others are doing with Active Data Warehouses. They can
spend half a day with your business executives and directors
Put the Teradata
explaining the kinds of applications and payback they have seen.
Industry Consultant to These workshops are best done in a round table white board
work discussion, not with presentations. Executives may not always let the
sales person in their office, but they are eager to learn from Industry
Consultants.
Contact your Teradata representative to get a list of companies in
Collect a few Active
your industry with Active Data Warehouses. Dig into the details on a
Data Warehouse couple of these examples. Also look on Teradata.com and Teradata
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2. Checklist ‐‐ Getting Started with Active Data Warehousing
References Magazine http://www.teradata.com/tdmo/
For the skeptics regarding data warehouses in real time applications,
an easy demo is to use Travelocity at
Show Travelocity low http://www.travelocity.com/flights and select the low fare alert.
fare alert “demo” The displayed deals come directly from a Teradata system. If you
login to Travelocity, most of the personalized advertizing is also
sourced from a Teradata system.
There's a trend in the BI/DW industry that's been brewing for a few
years called "pervasive BI" or "operational BI". Many companies,
including the competition, are connecting their data warehouse into
operational systems and applications. They deliver facts and
analytics to front line employees, partners, and even customers.
Elevator conversation
Everyone gets facts and insights in seconds to help them make the
(memorize) right business decisions. That's why they call it pervasive BI -- it gets
embedded in all kinds of business processes to help hundreds,
maybe thousands of employees make 3-5 smarter decisions every
day. We already have most of the data to make this happen in our
data warehouse. I suggest a few proof of concept small projects.
Active projects don't have to be expensive. Some amazing projects
have been done with as little as 3 weeks of programming, testing, and
Active applications roll out. Of course huge projects can be done if executives want to
don't have to be spend the money. But in general, there are dozens of easy, low cost
expensive projects that can payback handsomely. Even big active applications
cost < 1% of the system to run tactical queries and 4-8% of the
system for near real time loading.
This is always a key milestone for any project. This executive must
End Goal:
be visionary and willing to grasp new concepts. They normally look to
Find an executive others in the business team for recommendations so several people
sponsor must be convinced before the executive will support these projects.
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3. Checklist ‐‐ Getting Started with Active Data Warehousing
Recruiting IT Support
Convincing IT managers the data warehouse is more than a reporting subsystem will be
tougher than getting line of business support. The people responsible to make it work
are often the toughest skeptics. The IT group will split into two camps: a) those who
resist change and have too much to do already; b) those who embrace new
technologies. The first group is vital to the day-to-day success of the company so don't
get dismayed with their resistance. It's more important to rally the visionary types and
those who the CIO trusts to the possibilities of an Active Data Warehousetm. Here are
some of the ways to get started:
 Task Description
Educate yourself on Develop a good understanding of the technologies and integration
the 6 Active Elements points for an ADW first.
An ADW becomes a useful peer subsystem to the overall IT
architecture. This means fitting in with your architecture council's
strategy, tools, and middleware selections.
 What message queuing/ESB/EAI middleware is used?
 Are there standards for object oriented relational mapping
Learn the company's (ORM) such as Hibernate, JPA, or iBATIS?
middleware and  What portal and web application server technologies are in
overall IT architecture use (WebSphere, Tomcat, WebLogic, IIS, etc.)
 What Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tools do the
programmers user? i.e. Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans,
Rational, etc.
 Do the architects emphasize portlets, SOA, REST, federation,
or other design patterns?
Sit in on the CTO For the data warehouse to fit into the overall IT architecture, it helps
architecture council to know more about the current architecture, its goals, strategies,
meetings data flow, and limitations.
Workload management is the mandatory technology that makes
"active" possible. Every data warehouse gains significant benefits
from workload management by setting priorities, filters, and throttles.
Turn on TASM TASM was built for data warehousing and was later used by smart
DBAs to enable active applications. Consider hiring Teradata
Professional Services to tune your system and set up TASM.
The DBA staff and enterprise architects need to learn many of the
same active concepts as the line of business management. Find
ways to teach them the Active vision: what are the active
applications, how can we make money doing this, what have others
Communicate Active
done in our industry, etc. This is a multi-step process since there are
applications business many things to learn and the concepts have to be learned in steps,
value not all at once. Consider involving IT managers in the line of
business recruiting. Also consider having a Teradata Solution
Architect visit 3-4 times to discuss Active Data Warehouse tm
concepts and success stories.
Start on a small Once TASM is running, the smallest, easiest project to do is to add
project: Active Access high speed ADW access to a portal, an application, or any browser
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4. Checklist ‐‐ Getting Started with Active Data Warehousing
based display. This requires some Java or .NET programming to do
simple database look-ups. The data warehouse is just another
database, so programmers who write OLTP applications already
know how to build data access logic. Writing SQL and passing it to
JDBC or ODBC is not difficult. These kinds of projects can often be
done in 2-4 weeks and demonstrate value quickly.
A larger project than Active Access is to build mini-batch data loading.
The DBA staff can do it with minimal external dependencies AND the
line of business always has needs for near real time reports. Start
Start on a small
small with scheduled loads every few hours and increase the
project: mini-batch frequency once its stable in production. Be sure to build in and prove
the recovery processes. Do not start with 1-5 minute latencies or
streaming data (aka TPump) as the first project if there is a choice.
It's common for the line of business and IT to fast forward their
thinking to large projects with a lot of complexity, risk, and cost. If the
Executive sponsors wants this, get it done. Usually, big projects will
Minimize cost and halt Active Data Warehousing tm funding and support. It's much better
complexity for the first to start with small incremental pervasive BI projects that do not take
active projects six months and a dozen laborers. It's also less risky since your
organization can learn, make mistakes, and regroup quicker. Once
there are a few low cost low risk projects in production, there is a
foundation of knowledge and infrastructure to build on in the future.
Resistance to change is a universal human trait so a plan is needed
to help the front line users learn and use the active application. The
Getting the end users
programming staff must build self-service easy to use ways for the
to use the active front line users to submit tactical queries or near real time reports.
application Writing portlets for the employee portal are ideal for this as are near
real time dashboards. Avoid complexity and emphasize ease of use.
An Active Data Warehouse contains integrated data and runs mixed
workloads. That means many data marts and operational data stores
can be consolidated into the ADW. Typically, moving an ODS
workload into the data warehouse is what creates an Active Data
Do more with less Warehouse tm. It takes labor to migrate data marts and ODS's but
over time, the cost savings can run from $100K to $500K per year for
each repository. Think of an ADW as the equivalent of virtualization
software that enables server consolidation projects.
If IT is permitted to travel, schedule a full day in Teradata Labs San
End Goal: Schedule an Diego. Focus several of the agenda topics on Active Data
Active briefing at Warehouse technologies, best practices, and reference stories.
Teradata Labs in San Talking direct to the developers about TASM, mini-batch versus
Diego replication, tactical queries, and so on helps get the tough questions
solved.
For More Information: http://www.teradata.com/t/AEI-Starter-Kit/Getting-Started/
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