QAD Data Warehouse Designer's core strength is in the rapid building of data warehouse structures. Organizations that have already purchased traditional ETL tools can use QAD Data Warehouse Designer as a pureplay data warehouse toolset. QAD Data Warehouse Designer can be used to iteratively build data marts or presentation layer objects that need to be constantly updated to keep relevant for end users. In mosts cases customers will find that QAD Data Warehouse Designer has enough ETL capabilities to build the entire data warehouse, using the database rather than a proprietary engine to perform ETL processing.

The cross over in functionality between ETL tools and QAD Data Warehouse Designer is not large. QAD Data Warehouse Designer is tightly integrated into the data warehouse database and has an embedded data warehouse building approach. For QAD data movement is the start of the process - from source system to load tables. The key benefits of the product: development productivity and an integrated environment to manage and maintain your warehouse, come after the data movement stage. Where a traditional ETL tool is already in use, the output of the ETL process is a QAD Data Warehouse Designer's Load, Stage, Dimension, Fact or Model table from which QAD Data Warehouse Designer builds more advanced data warehouse structures.

 

 

The QAD Data Warehouse Designer Installation and Administration Guide, the online help, and the QAD Data Warehouse Designer User Guide assume that you are proficient in the use of the Windows operating system.

QAD Data Warehouse Designer often provides multiple ways to accomplish a task. In some cases, you can use the main menu, the right-mouse button menu, or a toolbar, or a key combination (e.g. Alt/M and Ctrl/M to raise menus). Instructions in this documentation generally include only the most convenient method of accomplishing a task.

The following sources of information are available with QAD Data Warehouse Designer: