Importance of capturing right Information
If you are a data warehouse manager, remember to capture all the time, period and business date information by department, as different parts of a business may have different dates and times. This information is crucial to the data warehouse design, because it can for example radically affect your weekend processing if some parts of the business have their week begin on Sunday and others have their week start on Monday.
Part of analyzing and understanding the business is getting to grips with the key business indicators, and the data dimensions that are important. What dimensions or data fields will the users want to summarize and query on? These fields will form the basis of all your aggregations, and this information - in conjunction with the date and period information discussed above-will allow you to define the base set of aggregations that will be required.
As part of the analysis you also need to drive out the meaningful levels of data detail. For example, if the business is a food retailer, does it need tb keep detailed records down to the sale of each individual tin of baked beans, or is it sufficient to. summarize sales of baked beans by tin size by brand by day?
