Course Expectations and Tentative Syllabus

CIS:624                                 Data Warehousing                                                                                              Spring 2007

                                                Bucks 125                                                                                                              M  6:15-9:00pm

Professor:                             Dr. Michael Redmond   

                                                330 Olney Hall  (215) 951-1096

redmond@lasalle.edu

                                                http://www.lasalle.edu/~redmond/teach/624

Office Hours:                       M  5:00-6:00pm

                                                And at other times by appointment. Also, by phone and e-mail.

Text:

                Mundy, J., Thornthwaite, W., and Kimball, R., The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset, Wiley, 2006. ISBN: 0-471-26715-5

Course Description:

                Data Warehousing is a popular and growing area involving the use of large scale data stores to support business decision-making. This course is intended to introduce the student to the critical success factors in designing and implementing a data warehouse. The textbook is geared toward people who will be applying the ideas in their organization – i.e. it is geared toward the practitioner not the theoretician.  While we are in some ways limited in our hands-on possibilities due to the size of realistic data, and the time a Data Warehouse project takes, there should be hands-on opportunities with software – Microsoft and otherwise.  

Topics to be covered include management, requirements analysis, design, infrastructure, data staging, data access, and if time permits, data mining.  The course assumes knowledge of database concepts, particularly relational database concepts of SQL and Normalization.  

Grading:

   Midterm                                                              20%

   Final Exam                                                          35%

   Assignments (5)                                                40%

   Class Participation                                              5%

   Grade Scale:

                A             92-100

A- 90-91

B+           88-89

B             82-87

B-            80-81

C             60-79

F              < 60

No make up exams unless arranged in advance.

Final exam is cumulative, but will focus more heavily on the (previously untested) final half of the course.

There will be several, varied assignments over the course of the semester. One will involve using Cognos PowerPlay OLAP software. This software is accessible over the WWW so should be able to be used outside La Salle. Another assignment will involve designing a hypothetical data mart. Others are TBD. The assignment due dates will be specified when they are assigned.

Course Objectives

Concepts:

1. The student should understand the benefits of database warehousing.

2. The student should understand the basic elements in the data warehouse.

3. The student should understand the phases in the data warehouse lifecycle. 

4. The student should understand the basic issues in data warehouse project management.

5. The student should understand the process of data warehouse requirements analysis.

6. The student should understand the principles of dimensional modeling using star schemas.

7. The student should understand the issues involved in staging data from operational systems into the data warehouse, including data extraction, transformation, cleansing, and building aggregates.

8. The student should understand the issues involved in providing warehoused data to business users to support decision making.

9. The student should understand the issues involved in determining infrastructure needs to support a data warehouse

10. (time permitting) The student should understand the use of data mining on warehouse data, and requirements mining puts on the warehouse.

Applications:

1. The student should gain some exposure and experience with a commercial OLAP tool.

2. The student should gain experience creating a logical design for a data mart.

3. The student should learn about the different categories of tools related to data warehousing currently available.

4. The student should understand the support for Data Warehousing in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Tentative Course Plan:

Date	Material	Reading
Jan 22	Intro to Class, Basic Elements of Data Warehouse  A Sample OLAP based Application	Introduction, Chapt 1
Jan 29	More on Life Cycle (outside sources)
Feb 5	Cognos OLAP Software
Feb 12	Dimensional Modeling	Chapt 2
Feb 19	Dimensional Modeling                                        YES, WE MEET ON PRESIDENT’S DAY	Chapt 2
Feb 26	Microsoft Toolset	Chapt 3
Mar 5	NO CLASS – SPRING  BREAK
Mar 12	MIDTERM
Mar 19	Set Up & Physical Design	Portions of Chapt 4
Mar 26	Designing the ETL System	Chapt 5
Apr 2	Developing the ETL System	Portions of Chapt 6
Apr 9	Designing the Analysis Services OLAP Database	Chapt 7
Apr 16	Business Intelligence Applications	Chapt 8
Apr 23	Building the BI Application in Reporting Service	Chapt 9
Apr 30	Final Exam