Course Expectations and Tentative Syllabus
CIS:624 Data Warehousing Fall 2005
Olney 200 M 6:15-9:00pm
Professor: Dr. Michael Redmond
330 Olney Hall (215) 951-1096
http://www.lasalle.edu/~redmond/teach/624
Office Hours: M 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 if we reach it.
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%
Assignments (5) 40%
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 will involve data staging planning. The fifth will involve creating data cubes for use in PowerPlay. 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 29 Intro to Class,
Basic Elements of Data Warehouse Chapt 1
A Sample OLAP based Application
Sept 5 NO CLASS – LABOR DAY
Sept 12 Data Warehouse Lifecycle Chapt 2
Sept 19 OLAP Software
Sept 26 Project Planning and Management, Chapt 3
Requirements Analysis Chapt 4
Oct 3 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 5
Oct 10 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 5
Oct 17 Dimensional Modeling Chapt 7
Oct 24 NO CLASS – FALL BREAK
Oct 31 MIDTERM
Nov 7 Data Warehouse Architecture Chapt 8
Back Room Chapt 9
Nov 14 Back Room Chapt 14
Nov 21 Back Room Chapt 16
Nov 28 Data Staging Software
Dec 5 Front Room Chapt 10, Chapt 17
Dec 12 Final Exam