Study and Systems Analysis

As in any SDLC, the first step involved Requirement Analysis. This Client has an intermediate team, the Functional Team, which interfaces with end users to gather and document business requirements. Data-Core Systems’ analysts created the functional specifications as an end result of this exercise.

Detailed Design

The detailed design phase involved:

• Defining the OLAP requirements
• Designing the prefabricated reports

Defining the OLAP Analysis Requirements

• Define Dimensions: business users defined the “dimensions” based on which data needs to be analyzed.
• Select Measures: the data that will be measured against the dimensions were selected.
• Design pre-fabricated reports: not all users use OLAP Cubes for analyzing sales data. for such cases, Data-Core built pre-fabricated reports using COGNOS Impromptu.
• Define Strategy: defined the Data Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) strategy.

Designing Datamart

For effective Datamart design, Data-Core used the Dimensional Analysis Document, Measures, Prefabricated Reports requirements and foreseeable future enhancements. The deliverables included dimension table design, a definition of slowly changing dimensions to maintain history, fact table design (measures are stored in fact tables), the Datamart Model in Snowflake Schema, the table keys, constraints and relationships, and the security model with embedded data which is required for secure transactions.

Data-Core carried out the following in this stage of the project:

• Implemented a pilot Datamart
• Performed Development and Unit Testing
• Built tables in Backoffice Datamart Test Environment
• Implemented the Data Extraction Process
• Developed Predefined Reports
• Built the OLAP Model
• Determined the Information Delivery System
• Completed Integration Testing