Course Expectations and Tentative Syllabus
CIS:624 Data Warehousing Spring 2008
Olney 201 Thur 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., Ross, M., Thornthwaite, W., Mundy, J., and Becker, B., The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit – Practical Techniques for Building Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Systems, Wiley, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-470-14977-5
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 the time a Data Warehouse project takes, there should be hands-on opportunities with software.
Topics to be covered include management, requirements analysis, design, infrastructure, data preparation, and data access (business intelligence). The course assumes knowledge of database concepts, particularly relational database concepts of SQL and Normalization.
Grading:
Midterm 25%
Final Exam 40%
Assignments (4 or 5) 30%
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. Another assignment will involve designing a hypothetical dimensional model. Others are TBD. 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 business process dimensional model design.
3. The student should learn about the different categories of tools related to data warehousing currently available.
4. (time permitting) The student should understand the support for Data Warehousing in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Tentative Course Plan:
|
Date |
Material |
Reading |
|
Jan 17 |
Intro to Class, Data Warehouse Lifecycle (Kimball method) A Sample OLAP based Application |
Introduction, Chapt 1 |
|
Jan 24 |
Launching and Managing the Program / Project |
Chapt 2 |
|
Jan 31 |
Requirements Determination |
Chapt 3 |
|
Feb 7 |
Technical Architecture |
Chapt 4 |
|
Feb 14 |
Architecture Plan and Selecting Products |
Chapt 5 |
|
Feb 21 |
OLAP Software |
|
|
Feb 28 |
MIDTERM |
|
|
Mar 6 |
NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK |
|
|
Mar 13 |
Dimensional Modeling |
Chapt 6 |
|
Mar 20 |
Dimensional Modeling YES, WE MEET ON HOLY THURSDAY |
Chapt 7 |
|
Mar 27 |
ETL System |
Chapt 9 |
|
Apr 3 |
Designing and Developing the ETL System |
Chapt 10 |
|
Apr 10 |
Business Intelligence Applications |
Chapt 11 |
|
Apr 17 |
Business Intelligence Applications |
Chapt 12 |
|
Apr 24 |
Deploying, Supporting, and Expanding the DW/BI System |
Chapt 13, 14 |
|
May 1 |
Final Exam |
|