 |
|
 |
BASICS: Streamlining the Information Supply Chain > The Content Factory
VDDW streamlines the content factory by doing two things. First it repositions OLAP from being a tool used primarily for summarized, subject-specific datamarts, to being the primary information publishing mechanism for the entire VDDW. Everything in the VDDW is presented in one big hyper cube. Lest one be concerned about the viability of using OLAP for staging large data sets, this approach has been successfully deployed in a production commercial setting for an enterprise generating billions of fact table records from their ABC allocation engine. Furthermore, when the ABC allocation model is built properly, OLAP can be used to perform certain portions of the ABC allocation process at query run-time, rather than performing those steps in a long-running RDBMS batch process that persists scads of data to disk. This dramatically reduces SAN storage costs.
Second, the VDDW incorporates the process of performing cost allocation directly into the DW staging area, and in so doing, eliminates the need to push large data sets back and forth between the DW and the allocation tool. That is to say, under the VDDW approach, the ABC engine operates upon its DW star schema fact / driver inputs in place. This also translates to fewer handoffs and therefore fewer points of failure, shorter processing times, and lower storage costs.
|
|
