The Stage Database and initial population

In a live environment, you would have one or more source systems that will be providing data to your TARGIT solution. These source systems could be, for example, a Microsoft Dynamics NAV or a Microsoft Dynamics AX system, or a product from another ERP system provider – or any kind of system producing large amounts of data in a structured manner.

For data from these systems to become meaningful and accessible to Business Intelligence systems like TARGIT Decision Suite, they will often need to go through a few steps of migrations and transformations.

The migration and transformation of data is typically handled in a number of databases, where data is being from migrated from one database to the next while being transformed on its way.

The databases involved are typically:

• A relational Stage
• A relational Data Warehouse database (optional – skipped in this manual).
• A multidimensional Data Warehouse database.

In this lesson, we will focus on creating the relational Stage database. The Stage database will be populated with data from a demo Navision database. In this course, we will not bother to create the relational Data Warehouse. Instead, our multi-dimensional Data Warehouse will be based directly on tables from the Stage database. The multidimensional database will be created when we start looking into SQL Server Analysis Services projects in a subsequent lesson.