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Nov 15
2008
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Today I ran across some discussion about Agile Development in Data Warehousing, and note that we talk about this in the context of the DW development, but not in relation to the Business. I believe there is a need to discriminate some of these processes quite differently. Most simply put - One is applying Agile to DW development; the other is applying Agile to Business Analysis.
Core DW foundations involve modeling root components of business data needs and implementing a data model which allows for flexibility to answer questions of the data - a concept I call "Designing for the Unknown". The more renormalization and change from the source system, typically the more transformation logic and less flexibility, and ergo higher cost and less organizational agility.
Effective Agile development of the DW infrastructure itself involves delineating the methodologies which can be used for what types of development functions. For example, creating a core or "root key" entity in the data model