How the Data Warehouse can Affect Performance

The data warehouse is a crucial component of the business intelligence system. If it does not perform well, the entire system's performance suffers. The data warehouse platform or RDBMS and the data warehouse's design and tuning are factors that can affect your system's performance.

Platform Considerations

The size and speed of the machines hosting your data warehouse and the database platform (RDBMS) running your data warehouse both affect the system's performance. A list of supported RDBMSs can be found in the Readme. You should have an idea of the amount of data and the number of users that your system serves, and research which RDBMS can handle that type of load.

Design and Tuning Considerations

Your data warehouse's design (also called the physical warehouse schema) and tuning are important and unique to your organization. They also affect the performance of your business intelligence system. The discussion of the set of trade-offs that you must make when designing and tuning the data warehouse is out of the scope of this guide. Examples of the types of decisions that you must make include:

• Will you use a normalized, moderately normalized, or fully denormalized schema?
• What kind of lookup, relate, and fact tables will you need?
• What aggregate tables will you need?
• What tables do you need to partition and how?
• What tables will you index?

For more information about data warehouse design and data modeling, see the Advanced Reporting Help and Project Design Help.