Overview of QAD Data Warehouse Designer

Traditionally data warehouses take too long to build and are too hard to change. QAD Data Warehouse Designer is an Integrated Development Environment to support the building and managing of data warehouses. It has the flexibility to enable you to build a variety of architectures including:

 enterprise data warehouses

 dimensional data warehouses

 user facing views, aggregates and summaries

In all cases the core values of QAD Data Warehouse Designer are twofold: its rapid building capabilities that enable better data warehouses to be built, faster, and its integrated environment that simplifies management.

 As a data warehouse specific tool, QAD Data Warehouse Designer embodies a simple, pragmatic approach to building data warehouses. With QAD Data Warehouse Designer you specify what you want to achieve by dragging and dropping objects to create a meta view, and then let QAD Data Warehouse Designer do the heavy lifting of creating the necessary tables and procedures etc. Data warehouse wizards prompt for additional information at critical points to provide the maximum value from the generated objects.

Different data warehousing approaches including agile,prototyping and waterfall are supported by QAD Data Warehouse Designer. Agile developers will find specific functionality has been included to support common agile practices. For developers who are new to data warehousing, or are looking for a fast, pragmatic approach, QAD's Pragmatic Data Warehousing Methodology can be used.

 minimize the impact on the source systems

 centralize management within the data warehouse

 store transactional data at the lowest practical grain within the data warehouse

 snapshot, combine and rollup transactional tables to provide additional value

 utilize star schemas, views or cubes for end user access

 allow for incremental loads from day one

 use an iterative approach

 minimize cleansing and transformations to ease source system reconciliation

 design the data warehouse independently from the end user tool layer

QAD Data Warehouse Designer supports these concepts to facilitate very rapid delivery of data warehouses.

QAD Data Warehouse Designer controls the flow of data from the source systems through transforming and modeling layers to analysis areas. Different styles of data warehousing (normalized, dimensional etc) are supported and utilize different objects, but all follow the same basic flow. While some of these stages can be skipped, the expected flow for the common approaches are: