M.S. REPORT

Business Intelligence Data Warehousing : An Open Source Approach

	Graduate Committee
	Dr. William Hankley
	Dr. Torben Amtoft
	Dr. Gurdip Singh

Objective

This report has two main objectives. The first is to study the technique of developing a functional data warehouse. The second objective is to investigate the use of open source software in the implementation of a data warehouse.

Motivation

The motivation for this report stems from the increasing demand for data warehousing in today's businesses. Almost all businesses today, big or small, rely on some form of analysis and reporting on which to base their business decisions. Businesses need to access historical data for spotting business trends, customer buying patterns, data relationships and other time and demography based studies. A data warehouse provides a business with all such data in an easy and quick manner.

Today, different proprietary tools are available for data analysis and warehousing but they are expensive and accessible only to large companies with higher budgets. However, using open source software, as opposed to commercial products for data warehousing provides a huge financial gain. Open source gives smaller and medium-sized companies, which are tight on budgets, an opportunity to use data warehouses and reap benefits that they could never have imagined. With major companies moving towards open source as a shelter to cut down costs in all of their different applications, an open source approach to data warehousing seems like a promising technique to study.

Software/Technologies

• Operating System - MS Windows XP Professional
• Database Server - MS SQL Server 2005
• Source Database - Nothwind Database, SQL Server Sample database
• ETL Tool - SQL Server Integration Services
• Web Application Server - Apache Tomcat Server
• OLAP Server - Mondrian open source Server
• Reporting Tools - JPivot, JSP based reporting client