Connecting the Data

Business data integration is a complex problem that must be solved when organizations change or enhance their internal structures. The goal of this book is to present a simple yet thorough resource that describes the challenges of business data integration and the solutions to these challenges such as schema integration, illustrated through an Operational Data Store (ODS) case study.

This book contains three sections spanning ten chapters. Section I, Foundational Concepts, will provide you with the necessary basic concepts and discuss schema integration. Section II, Preparation and Design, introduces the case study and we will reverse engineer each of the data sources to create a set of data dictionary reports which will provide us with the meta data we need to apply the schema integration process. Section III, Physical Implementation, will present scripts to populate each of the source databases and spreadsheets and use reports to create Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) specifications. The ten chapters within these three sections are:

• Chapter 1 – Introduction and Roadmap


• Chapter 2 – What is an Operational Data Store (ODS)?


• Chapter 3 – What is Schema Integration?


• Chapter 4 – The Role of the ODS within DW Architectures

• Chapter 5 – Reverse Engineering the four Source Schema


• Chapter 6 – Designing the Interim Schema


• Chapter 7 – Preparing the ETL Specifications


• Chapter 8 – Designing the Physical ODS Database Model


• Chapter 9 – Designing Our ETL processes with SSIS

• Chapter 10 – Data Quality Profiling