Joe,

As wildh suggested, any books by Kimball or Inmon are good. After that, it's a matter of experience and practice to be able to deliver a useful reporting/analysis platform. Of...

Joe,

I agree with wildh. Normally I start by asking the users and managers what metrics and dimensions are important. Then, because this usually doesn't get everything, I ask what questions...

Hi Ed,

It would be hard to imagine compliance for the situation you outlined. Of course, if everything was documented and data modifications had an audit trail...

Maybe you should speak with...

SOX requires that the data used to generate the financial statements is created and modified only by approved and documented processes. Any details relating to SQL Server (or any other...

Here is a simple way: Create a get_file.bat file with the following line:

FTP -i -s:get_file.txt (you may have to use a fully qualified name)

Then create get_file.txt with

open UNIX_box (DNS name...

Swine. You got me. I guess the coffee hasn't kicked in! Maybe it's because we all WANT to believe.

Many applications use proprietary databases. Certainly the data often "belongs" to the user(s). However, since application logic and sometimes trade secrets are reverse-engineerable (if that's a word!), protecting the schema...

katesl - Switch to decaf.

Vik,

A data warehouse is appropriate for all but the most rudimentary reporting systems. Hitting the transactional system directly is always risky -- especially considering the price of hardware today. Also,...

I usually create a "Dates" table to store such information.  I can then populate the fiscal calendar easily. I start with 34700 because that's the Excel numerical equivalent of 1/1/1995....

How about having a few of the vendors do a proof of concept? You'll never be able to nail down performance issues without testing under circumstances as close as possible...

Hi Lori,

I'm a Cognos partner, so I may be a bit prejudiced...

Cognos has a full suite of B.I. products to do everything from building a dimensionally-aware DW (DecisionStream) to presenting...

Thanks for the input. My concern here is Disk I/O. I'll read the BOL and do some more testing.

I understand that there is very little fragmentation. My question is, since there are 1427 free bytes per page and only 14 rows per page, can I add a tinyint...

As a Microsoft Action Pack subscriber I figured that RS would be shipped automatically. When I didn't get it, I contacted both Microsoft and the MAPS people by email. Microsoft said...