Agile Data Warehousing: Building a Virtualized ODS

At a recent client, in order to meet timelines to fulfill urgent, unmet reporting needs, I found it necessary to build a virtualized Operational Data Store (ODS) as the first phase of a new Data Vault 2.0 project. This allowed me to deliver new objects, quickly and incrementally to the report developer so we could quickly show the business users their data. In order to limit the need for refactoring in later stages of the data warehouse development, I chose to build this virtualization layer on top of a Type 2 persistent staging layer. All of this was done using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (SDDM) against (gasp!) a MS SQL Server Database.

In this talk I will show you the architecture for this approach, the rationale, and then the tricks I used in SDDM to build all the stage tables and views very quickly. In the end you will see actual SQL code for a virtual ODS that can easily be translated to an Oracle database.

Learn a data warehouse architecture that can be implemented incrementally and in layers
Learn what is a Virtual ODS and how it can help you be Agile
How to quickly build pattern based stage tables in SDDM
How to build complex, pattern based views in SDDM
Tip on how to use analytic functions to create virtual columns
See examples of how to embed change data capture into a view-based loading architecture

Kent Graziano is a Senior Technical Evangelist with Snowflake Computing and the author of The Data Warrior blog (http://kentgraziano.com). He is a certified Data Vault Master (CDVP2), Oracle ACE Director, former member of the Boulder BI Brain Trust (#BBBT), expert data modeler and architect with over 30 years of experience, including 25 years doing data warehousing with multiple architectures. Kent is an award winning speaker and author having written numerous articles, and has done over 100 presentations, nationally and internationally. He is a co-author of four books including "The Data Model Resource Book" (1st Edition) and "Supercharge Your Data Warehouse." He now has several ebooks on Kindle including "A Check List for Doing Data Model Design Reviews." You can follow Kent on his blog and twitter @kentgraziano.