Companies spend hours and hours (and of course, tons of money) on developing their dream enterprise portal with slick dashboards and interfaces for data analysis. What probably gets ignored often is the supporting data model itself.
I have seen companies that build phenomenal transactional systems that crunch a million transactions on a regular basis. Translating this transactional data to support reporting is another matter. The same transactional structures are often carried over into the reporting world (with a bit of denormalization here, and a bit of pivots there), but essentially the same transactional structure to support the reporting applications.
And therein lies the problem. You cannot expect Business Objects or Cognos or any other tool out there to scale unless you have a sound reporting data model to support them. It does not make good business and project management sense to embed the code and transformational logic into the reporting tool, when the ETL should be the source and focus of all major transformations.
I am not sure how much this lethargy to convert a transactional model to a denormalized reporting model exists out there; I will not be surprised if it is very prevalent.
I have seen companies that build phenomenal transactional systems that crunch a million transactions on a regular basis. Translating this transactional data to support reporting is another matter. The same transactional structures are often carried over into the reporting world (with a bit of denormalization here, and a bit of pivots there), but essentially the same transactional structure to support the reporting applications.
And therein lies the problem. You cannot expect Business Objects or Cognos or any other tool out there to scale unless you have a sound reporting data model to support them. It does not make good business and project management sense to embed the code and transformational logic into the reporting tool, when the ETL should be the source and focus of all major transformations.
I am not sure how much this lethargy to convert a transactional model to a denormalized reporting model exists out there; I will not be surprised if it is very prevalent.
1 comment:
I think companies have a hard time changing the architecture of their software because current reporting tools already work, and because the risk vs. short-term profit ratio is small. But the idea is great - maybe it just needs a reporting software company to develop its own enterprise portals.
I enjoyed your writings so far - keep it up :)
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