Author Archives: reagan

1. Project scope, deliverables & documentation

One of the most important things in life is having a solid foundation and goal before you do anything. If you build a house without a concrete foundation, or begin programming without an understanding of syntax, or taking a shower without soap your end result will be less than desirable. The same goes for any data warehouse project.

I’m working on a project where we have to load over 700GB of raw data into a Data Warehouse to provide querying and analytics to the business unit. The choice was made to build this DW on an SQL Server 2005 3-node cluster with a 6TB network attached SAN. (The excess disk space was purchased in order to support ~1GB of nightly loads and 3 years of growth. I’ll cover more on that later.)

There are many blogs out there with great information on Microsoft’s SQL Server product.

While some offer small, short posts with great advice like Pinal’s blog:

- http://blog.sqlauthority.com/

others go really deep into the theory and internals of SQL Server like Bob’s and Kalen’s:

- http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb