Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Data Warehouse Risk

The high rate of turnover of employees and contractors in the Data Warehouse arena often leaves managers in a troubling position. If the organization is not employing the use of ODI, there may be a lot of open-ended questions leading Management scrambling for answers – suddenly the Data Warehouse becomes a high-risk unit compromising the corporation.

Stopping the “I Don’t Knows...”

“I don’t know… what jobs are in the Data Warehouse.” Not only might the Manager not know which jobs there are, but which are actively running.
“I don’t know… what these jobs actually do. Many jobs in the data warehouse lack documentation that is easy readable or easily compliable on short notice.
Let’s use the scenario that an employee leaves – now the Manager has to play catch up. They have to hire a replacement and train them on the current environment. There never seems to be enough time for knowledge transfer from the employee exiting. ODI can help – it not only has a place to take notes in the job, but then with the simple click of a button the documentation will appear in PDF format. Something else to consider: data warehouses normally hold hundreds of jobs. How long would it take for you to compile all of the documentation for every single one?
“I don’t know… how this was coded.” Sometimes a Manager might have a great employee who knows Advance coding that pass parameter into other parameters that then pick something else. Are all your developers at this level? ODI forces the developer to use the same style of coding as for much of the functionality needed for data warehousing out of the box.
Any data warehouse can be great if it’s organized; here at CheckPoint we feel the way to do this is through ODI. We have come up with a system to not only keep the jobs organized but also standard across the board. With the new ODI 12c merging with OWB this brings even more out-of-the-box functionality for data warehousing to the table.

Next we’ll discuss ODI Project Management in Part 2 of Identifying and Managing the Data Warehouse "I Don’t Knows..."

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