DW Architect Features

Design Dimensions

DW Architect allows you to design dimensions, their attributes and business keys, without delving into physical implementation. Define dimension business keys and attributes including attribute descriptions, data types, slowly changing types, parent settings etc. Define custom surrogate key data types and names. Optionally generate the DDL for a Dimension. The Physical DDL is generated from your design.
 

Design Facts

DW Architect allows you to design facts tables and their dimensionality in the data warehouse. Define measures, their data type and description. Associate the Fact with the dimensions defined in the project. DW Architect caters for Role play names, Many to Many dimensions and conforming dimensions from other Data Marts. Optionally generate the DDL for a Fact table. The Physical DDL is generated from your design.
 

Import Fact and Dimension Schema from Source Systems.

Often the starting point for a dimension of fact is a primary source table. The source table defines the attributes/measures that your Dimension/Fact table will contain. To speed up the design process you can connect to your source database (or any other OLEDB data source) and import the schema of the table as the starting point for your dimension/fact design.

Generate your Relational Data Warehouse DDL

DW Architect will generate the initial and change DDL scripts required to create and update your relational Data Warehouse schema, for any target environment. You can generate directly in Visual Studio, or from the Configuration Utility in higher environments where Visual Studio may not be installed. DW Architect uses an audit trail, rather than a compare method of change capture. The audit method captures column renames as column renames. Many compare algorithms treat renames as drop column and create column transactions.

Create your own DDL Generation Templates

DW Architect allows you to standardize the Data Warehouse DDL by defining custom DDL generation templates using a simple template language.

Use XSLT to generate Documentation

Underlying all objects in a DW Architect Project are XML files. This offers you the opportunity to use the Meta Data created in a DW Architect project along with XSLT to generate documentation directly from the Meta Data.

Integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio

DW Architect is a custom Visual Studio project type. Both Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 are supported. Design your Data Warehouse right along side your other BIDS projects for Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services. Only the Visual Studio shell that comes with SQL Server client tools is required.

Deploy into higher Environments

DW Architect XML objects can be deployed from source control into higher development/production environments. Once deployed the Configuration Utility can be used to generate ‘update’ DDL for that environment. The Config Utility includes a command line option which allows the deployment process to be automated. Alternatively DDL generated in one environment (say, System Test) could be migrated from one environment to the next.