DW Architect

Save your Data Warehouse Project $40,000 and 10 weeks of Effort!

DW Architect saves the typical Data Warehousing team hundreds of hours per year. An average Data Warehousing team member might spend 2-4 hours per week sharing and syncing with schema changes, updating their local development databases, saving and restoring data, writing scripts to migrate data warehouse schema through development environments etc.

Extrapolate that 2 hours per team member for a 4 person team over a year, and you have saved $25,000 to $40,000 and 10 weeks of work!

Design in Visual Studio

DW Architect is a Visual Studio add-in project type, specifically created to rapidly design best practice Data Warehouses.

The Data Warehouse project sits right along side your other Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Visual Studio projects for SSIS, SSAS, SSRS.

The Data Warehouse is the hub of your Business Intelligence Solution, yet there is no Microsoft Design environment for the Data Warehouse. DW Architect plugs this gap with a custom Visual Studio project type.

Easily Share & Migrate Schema Changes

Eliminate Schema change management issues.

Eliminates change management issues around schema migration and synchronization. Put your data warehouse design under source control and easily share it with your development team. Migrate the project through your environments, and generate the schema changes automatically.

DW Architect generates Database change scripts using a unique synchronization algorithm, which faithfully replicates things like column name changes, without deleting the existing data in you Data Warehouse tables.

A Configuration utility enables each of you developers and each environment to have their its configuration. A command line utility allows integration automated build tools.

Save Time Avoid Mistakes

A refined approach to Data Warehouse development.

Most software development is a process of refinement, from Requirements to Implementation. Standard practice is to separate Logical from Physical design. Until now, designing Data Warehouses was tackled in 2 ways.

1. A document approach. This is effective but laborious. Logical design is defined in documentation, but once documented, the design must be implemented from scratch.
2. An implementation approach. This is quick but requires the designer to work at a granularity which is inappropriate and often leads to rework, or worse, with a business stuck with a sub standard data warehouse.

DW Architect introduces a 3rd approach which combines the best of the above approaches. Your Data Warehouse Architect uses DW Architect to create the logical design, and then simply generates the physical implementation. This is both effective and quick.

Be Productive

Save 10 weeks of effort each year.

DW Architect saves the typical Data Warehousing team hundreds of hours per year. An average Data Warehousing team member might spend 2 hours a week sharing and syncing with schema changes, updating their local development databases, saving and restoring data. Extrapolate that 2 hours per team member for a 4 member team over a year, and you have saved $25,000 to $40,000 and 10 weeks of work! That’s just the beginning, you will also save time in release and environment management.

DW Architect allows team members to quickly and easily share and migrate changes, in most cases preserving existing data in tables as it does so.

Why not just use a commercial schema synchronization tool? Its true, existing schema change management tools can help you mange schema change in a similar way to DW Architect. However DW Architect has a number of advantages:

1. A design environment specific to Data Warehouses that reduces design time, with best practice design patterns baked in.

2. DW Architect more faithfully replicates the schema change. A synchronization tool executes a column name change as a column delete and column create. This will destroy any data in the deleted column, putting extra burden on developers to write scripts to restore that data after that change is made. DW Architect, changes the column name, as the designer intended, and preserves the data in the column.

3. Many sync tool operate outside of the Visual Studio environment, while DW Architect exists along side all your other Microsoft Data Warehouse Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services projects.

Customize

Embed standards into the schema generation engine through customizable templates.

Underlying DW Architect is a set of customizable schema templates that DW Architect uses to generate schema changes. Data Warehouse Architects can modify the templates and embed there standards into the schema generation system. Template language is similar to C#, simple, and easy to understand.

Confidence, Control and Skills Transfer

As a project manager you want confidence in your projects ability to deliver on requirements. DW Architect comes with pre configured best practice templates to ensure the quality of your schema, regardless of the skill level of your Data Warehouse team.

Architects can maintain control of the schema by embedding their standards into the schema generation templates. This avoids a proliferation of different table designs, that once in place are difficult to reverse and difficult to maintain.

Just like a golf game that develops without proper training, it’s hard to break bad habits once they form. Starting with the guidance of a professional puts your project immediately on track and ensures your people develop the right skills. DW Architect comes with a set of pre configured best practice templates, so no matter what your organizational skill level you can be confident you are starting out in the best possible way.

Don’t get locked in

Generate the Schema for any DBMS

At any time you can modify your underlying implementation (Perhaps to a different DBMS) and simply regenerate your schema. Because DW Architect generates the schema based on templates, it’s even possible to generate the schema for different database platforms (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc) from the one project. Simply point the configuration at a different set of templates.