Starring Sakila: Building Data Warehouses and BI solutions using MySQL and Pentaho

The Sakila sample database makes for a great mini-tutorial on how to design, create, load and use a data warehouse. This is the main thread of this mini tutorial. While the main thread of the turorial focuses on general business intelligence and data warehouse concepts, the tutorial also contains hands-on parts. The hands-on parts are a great way to get introduced to a variety of open source tools (mainly focused on the Pentaho) for building and developing data warehouses and business intelligence applications. To facilitate attendees in participating themselves in the hands-on parts, I will provide an archive containing all required software and materials, as well as detailed written instructions.

The following outline explains the structure of this tutorial in more detail

• The Business Intelligence problem: Creating information out of data.
  • Different information needs and types of business intelligence
• How data warehousing helps to solve the BI problem
  • What is a Data Warehouse?
  • Data Warehouse Requirements
  • Open source Analytic Database Systems (ADBMS)
• Anatomy of a data warehouse
  • Data Warehouse Architectures
  • Dimensional modeling
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• Physical implementation of data warehouses
  • Star schemas and snowflakes
• A star is born
  • Dimensional models for rentals and payments from the sakila database
  • Hands on: modeling a data warehouse with Kettle (a.k.a. Pentaho Data Integration)
• Filling the data warehouse
  • Extraction, transformation and loading
  • Hands on: Data profiling with eobjects Data Cleaner
  • Hands on: Building ETL jobs and transformations with Kettle (a.k.a. Pentaho Data Integration)
• Presenting the Data: BI Applications
  • Reporting, Dashboarding and Analysis
  • Hands on: Building reports with Pentaho report designer
  • Hands on: Building cubes and dynamic pivot tables with Mondrian (a.k.a. Pentaho Analysis Services)
  • Hands on: Dashboarding with the Community Dashboard Framework