Course
Expectations and Tentative Syllabus
CIS:624 Data Warehousing Fall
2004
Bucks
Campus Room 125 Tu 6:15-9:00pm
Professor: Dr. Michael
Redmond
330
Olney Hall (215) 951-1096
http://www.lasalle.edu/~redmond/624
Office Hours: Tu 5:00-6:00pm
And
at other times by appointment. Also, by phone and e-mail.
Text:
Kimball,
R., Reeves, L., Ross, M., and Thornthwaite, W., The Data Warehouse Lifecycle
Toolkit, Third Edition, Wiley, 1998
Course Description:
Data
Warehousing is a popular and growing area involving the use of large scale data
stores to support business decision-making. This course is intended to
introduce the student to the critical success factors in designing and
implementing a data warehouse. The textbook is geared toward people who will be
applying the ideas in their organization – i.e. it is geared toward the
practitioner not the theoretician.
While we are in some ways limited in our hands-on possibilities due to
the size of realistic data, and costs of realistic tools, there should be
hands-on opportunities with OLAP software. It is anticipated that we will do
some role-play of situations in order to make other parts of the course come to
life.
Topics
to be covered include management, requirements analysis, design,
infrastructure, data staging, data access, and data mining. Data mining is largely outside of the scope
of the text, so supplemental readings will be identified.
The
course assumes knowledge of database concepts, particularly relational database
concepts. The text assumes some familiarity with client-server ideas (but not
practice).
Grading:
Midterm 20%
Final Exam 35%
Design Assignment 10%
OLAP Assignment 10%
Data Staging Assignment 10%
Aggregates and Disk Space Assignment 10%
Class Participation 5%
Grade Scale:
A 92-100
A-
90-91
B+ 88-89
B 82-87
B- 80-81
C 60-79
F < 60
No
make up exams unless arranged in advance.
Final
exam is cumulative, but will focus more heavily on the (previously untested)
final half of the course.
There
will be several, varied assignments over the course of the semester. One will
involve using Cognos PowerPlay OLAP software. This software is accessible over
the WWW so should be able to be used outside La Salle. A second assignment will
involve designing a hypothetical data mart. A third will involve estimating disk space requirements for a data mart
and the impact of aggregates. A fourth is still to be determined, but should
involve data staging. The assignment due dates will be specified when they are
assigned.
Course
Objectives
Concepts:
1. The
student should understand the benefits of database warehousing.
2. The
student should understand the basic elements in the data warehouse.
3. The
student should understand the phases in the data warehouse lifecycle.
4. The
student should understand the basic issues in data warehouse project
management.
5. The
student should understand the process of data warehouse requirements analysis.
6. The
student should understand the principles of dimensional modeling using star
schemas.
7. The
student should understand the issues involved in staging data from operational
systems into the data warehouse, including data extraction, transformation,
cleansing, and building aggregates.
8. The
student should understand the issues involved in providing warehoused data to
business users to support decision making.
9. The
student should understand the issues involved in determining infrastructure
needs to support a data warehouse
10. (time
permitting) The student should understand the use of data mining on warehouse
data, and requirements mining puts on the warehouse.
Applications:
1. The
student should gain some exposure and experience with a commercial OLAP tool.
2. The student should gain experience creating
a logical design for a data mart.
3. The
student should learn about the different categories of tools related to data
warehousing currently available.
Tentative
Course Plan:
Date
Material Reading
Aug 31 Intro
to Class,
Basic Elements
of Data Warehouse Chapt
1
A Sample OLAP
based Application
Sept 7 Data
Warehouse Lifecycle Chapt
2
Sept 14 OLAP
Software
Sept 21 Project Planning and
Management, Chapt 3
Requirements Analysis Chapt
4
Sept 28 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 5
Oct 5 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 5
Oct 12 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 7
Oct 19 MIDTERM
Oct 26 NO CLASS – FALL BREAK
Nov 2 Data Warehouse Architecture Chapt 8
Back Room Chapt
9
Nov 9 Back Room Chapt
14
Nov 16 Back Room Chapt
16
Nov 23 Data Staging Software
Nov 30 Front Room Chapt
10, Chapt 17
Dec 7 Data Mining supplemental
Dec 14 Final Exam