Friday 25 November 2016

MSBI : Data Warehouse Design Concept

Data Warehouse Design can be done by two most common approaches,There are two persons as “Gods of BIDW”: Ralph Kimball and William Inmon.
These two persons given some important Data warehouse concepts which need to be followed as standards for BIDW.

- Ralph Kimball provided “Bottom – Up approach”
- Bill Inmon provided “Top – Down approach”

In simple words definition, A data warehouse is a central repository for all an organization's data. The goal of a data mart, is to meet the particular demands of a specific group of users within the organization, such as human resource management (HRM). Generally, an organization's data marts are subsets of the organization's data warehouse.

Data warehouse (DW) Vs Data Mart (DM)

Data Warehouse:
- Holds multiple subject areas
- Holds very detailed information
- Works to integrate all data sources
- Does not necessarily use a dimensional model but feeds dimensional models.
Data Mart:
- Often holds only one subject area- for e.g. Finance, HR, IT or Sales
- May hold more summarised data (although many hold full detail)
- Concentrates on integrating information from a given subject area or set of source systems
- Is built focused on a dimensional model using a star schema.



Bill Inmon

says “A Data warehouse is a Subject-oriented, Integrated, Time-variant and Non-volatile collection of Data in support of Management’s decision making process”.

It means, First make a normalized data model then split into data marts based upon subject areas.Dimensional data marts are created only after the complete data warehouse has been created.
To built data Warehouse it will take more time compare to Ralph Kim-ball approach.



Ralph Kimball

says "The data warehouse is nothing more than the union of all the data marts".

It means, First create data marts and then make a schema relation. Dimensional data marts (DI mention and Fact table) provide a narrow view into the organizational data, then they related by start or snow flex schema based on requirement.
To built data ware house it will take less time compare to Bill Inmon approach.


MSBI : Data Warehouse

What is a Data Warehouse?


A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. It usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but can include data from other sources. Data warehouses separate analysis workload from transaction workload and enable an organization to consolidate data from several sources.

There are two persons as “Gods of BIDW”: Ralph Kimball and William Inmon.
These two persons given some important Data warehouse concepts which need to be followed as standards for BIDW.
- Ralph Kimball provided “Bottom – Up approach”
- Bill Inmon provided “Top – Down approach”

In the world of BIDW, William Inmon provided most popular definition: “A Data warehouse is a Subject-oriented, Integrated, Time-variant and Non-volatile collection of Data in support of Management’s decision making process”.

What makes a Data warehouse?


1. Subject-Oriented : Data warehouse can be used to analyse a specific subject area. e.g – In an Organization, Subject area can be different Depts like HR, IT, Sales and many more. So, it can be used to analyse particular Dept like HR or IT.
2. Integrated : With Integrated we mean data from heterogeneous data sources is integrated in Data warehouse. e.g – Excel Sheet Source stores date in different format and MySQL DB source stores date in another format, but in a Data warehouse, dates will be stored in a single format only.
3. Non-volatile : Nonvolatile means that, once entered into the data warehouse, data should not change. This is logical because the purpose of a data warehouse is to enable you to analyse what has occurred.
4. Time-Variant : Data warehouse deals with historical data only. It acts as a pit where Transactional data is dumped every day. We can retrieve data which is 6 months, 12 months old or even more than this from a data warehouse. For example – You hold a SBI bank account and updated your contact details. So, Transaction system can only provide you the current contact details whereas Data warehouse holds all the contact details associated with your account (Current and Previous both).
This is very much in contrast to On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems, where performance requirements demand that historical data be moved to an archive.

In addition to a relational database, a data warehouse environment can include an Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) solution, statistical analysis, reporting, data mining capabilities, client analysis tools, and other applications that manage the process of gathering data, transforming it into useful, actionable information, and delivering it to business users.

Friday 18 November 2016

SQL Server Services : Access is denied ( Event ID : 7000 )

Hello Everyone, A week ago I was working on fresh MS SQL Server 2012 SP3 Installation on newly built Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Standard on a VMware virtual machine. I installed default Instance with SQL Services running with "Local System", an Installation went smooth. however once Installation completed I was trying to run the SQL Services from Domain account (i.e. Domain\User) the services were stopped and there were errors in the OS system log:
Log Name:      System
Source:        Service Control Manager
Date:          10/11/2016 12:10:01 PM
Event ID:      7000
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      ******
Description:
The SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER) service failed to start due to the following error: 
Access is denied.

Case - I

I also tried to run SQL services from SQL Server Configuration Manager by creating local server user but again no success, not able to start the services getting same error.
Then I called my most technical friend Google, but unfortunately this didn't get me very far; it took a bit more digging. I got few more errors from the Application log, the System log, and the bootstrap summary (%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Setup Bootstrap\Log\Summary.txt):

- Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation
- error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server

I was googling more detailed error logs from the bootstrap summary log that helps me to find the right path towards the solution.

Then I got to know that When you build MS Windows Server 2012 on VMware we need to disable the HotAdd/HotPlug capability.
This was a difficult one to track down, but thanks to MSDN forums and the community I now have a new item on my build checklist.

Case - II

Also there is the same solution for SQL Server failing to install if the one of the folders was set to a volume other than C: – the installation logs and Process Monitor traces pointed to “access denied” but it was not clear why this should be failing.

It turns out that the problem is specific to Windows Server 2012 when running under VMWare with the hot-plug capability enabled – under Hyper-V, VirtualBox or on physical hardware the problem does not occur.