ABSTRACT

Your data warehouse has been designed and built to be more than the sum of its parts, especially more than just the data loaded into it. Used to its fullest, the warehouse contains knowledge not available within any of its individual source systems. Some of that knowledge is generated by combining source system data in novel ways, and some knowledge needs to be coaxed out of the warehouse by adding semantic linkages that provide connectivity and visibility into the data. Whether explicitly connected or implicitly coaxed, this new knowledge is the primary purpose for the data warehouse, and much of it was enabled by the generic nature of the warehouse design. Nothing introduced into the design of the warehouse should inhibit these novel combinations and interconnections of data precisely because you can’t predict where new knowledge will arise.