Complexity of Reporting in DW Environment

The maturity of the DW implementation is based on the following functionality when it comes to Reporting.

Every DW begins with a handful of reports which focuses mainly on the management requirement. Typically 90% of the reports are static by nature, only arguments change thus the required data is represented in the following formats (Table, Cross tab, chart, combination of all etc). As time passes, business have more requirements and thought process which we cannot implement only through static reports, so more tools / technologies comes under BI / Reporting area. For example a business user wants to add one more column / object in the report when they are analyzing the data.

Types of work / reports typically comes out of DW

1. Static / Canned Reports (What happened or Known Questions)
2. Ad hoc Reports (Why it happened or Analysis)
3. Dashboards (One view based on the role rather than digging deep – KPI representation)
4. Data Mining (What will happen / Predictive analysis – more of statistics)
5. Business Activity Monitoring (Defining threshold against every KPI and taking automated actions based on the event -- it's also called as Active DW in some implementations)

One technology in BI (Reporting / OLAP) won’t solve all the above. So, typically we have multiple technologies in the BI reporting side compared to ETL / Integration layer in the DW.

So, when compared to Integration (ETL) Layer in a DW, OLAP will have different software packages to solve each one of the problem we have in terms of requirements.