Designing an ODS / DW with high availability and consistency

Designing an ODS / DW with high availability and consistency

It's widely recognized that database sizes are growing significantly, and that the growth is being forced by many factors, such as companies requiring more data to be available online for longer (e.g. to comply with government regulations) or an increasing amount of data being digitized for storage. This extent of data explosion has given a momentum for business intelligence application as well. The business intelligence application gathers and stores data for analyzing historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. The gathering and storage of data, on which these business analytics are done, is done by either data warehouse, data mart or ODS (Operational Data Store). Because now-a-days the success of the business is heavily influenced by these business intelligence applications for better and informed business decisions which further rely on data warehouse or ODS for its data feed, it becomes very essential to design a highly available data warehouse or ODS which provides consistent data all the time.

In this video/paper I am going to discuss different approaches (or some of the many available approaches) which you can take to design an ODS for its high availability and data consistency, I will start my discussion with a very basic approach and will list down its pros and cons. Gradually I will move on to the better approach than previous one in terms of its availability and consistency. And finally I provide you some strategic ODS design decision choices and best practices to consider while designing and maintaining it.

Though going forward I will be referring to an ODS design only but same approaches can also be applied for data warehouse as well. You can watch the video or download the deck and article as per your convenience, click here for more details.

SQL Server 2008 R2 - SQL Azure Enhancements

SQL Server 2008 R2 - SQL Azure Enhancements
If you were unhappy with the capabilities of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) while working with SQL Azure, then there is good news for you. Microsoft has announced the November CTP for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The SSMS of this version allows you to work with SQL Azure in almost the same way as when you are connected to a local SQL Server. In other words, now you can use your favorite Object Explorer in SSMS to browse through the database objects hosted in SQL Azure as well. In this article, I am going to show how you can use SSMS’s Object Browser to connect/browse to SQL Azure database. For more details click here.

SQL Azure - Starting up...

SQL Azure - Learning from scratch....

There has been lots of buzz about cloud computing lately and looking at the benefits it provides (in terms of cost savings, high availability, scalability (scale up/down) etc.) it is now evident that cloud computing is the future for next generation applications. Many of tomorrow's applications will be designed and hosted in the cloud. Microsoft realizes this potential and provides a cloud computing solution with Windows Azure. Windows Azure platform, which is hosted inside Microsoft data centers, offers several services which you can leverage while developing your application if you target them for the cloud. One of them is Microsoft SQL Azure, it's a cloud based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. In this article, I am going to show how you can start creating databases and database objects on the cloud with SQL Azure. For more details, click here.