Key Periods
The key periods are the important reporting and financial periods. Does the business have special processing each week, each month, each quarter and so on? Some businesses are not interested in information in the short term, such as daily, and will tend to analyze data over weekly or larger periods. This may be because a given day’s business takes several days to process through the operational systems, with the data becoming available to the data warehouse over the period of a week or longer. It could be that the business does not do daily analysis because it never had the processing power to do it. You need to understand the reasons and the requirements. Just because they do not analyze daily data now, possibly because they have not been able to, it does not mean they will never want to analyze data on a daily basis.
Key business dates need to be documented. The start of the company’s business year, the start of the local tax year and so on are key dates, and will have effects on the processing load on the data warehouse. Some companies have standard business holidays when the business closes down for a number of days or weeks.
