Your data warehouse – data mart – reporting database, however you want to slice it, is the single most important foundation for creating reports and ultimately using analytical tools for data discovery.

Some of the more “modern” tools such as Reporting Services, Tableau, Excel’s Power Pivot and others are dramatically changing the way we need to think about how we design the underlying data structures to make the use of these new tools for our user communities of analysts and decision makers.

Many of the old constraints of data cubes, complex-star schemas and long complex planning and design cycles for data warehouses need to be rethought and changed to a more flexible and agile development methodology.

In this session we’ll look at some concepts and show some practical examples of how to design a few underlying data warehouse tables to support ease of use in analytical tools and help you reduce the amount of effort in creating the data structures you need in your data warehouse.