The MicrosoftВ Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL ServerВ 2005 and the MicrosoftВ Business Intelligence Toolset

The Great Unveiling

Overview

As you see in Figure 14.1, the deployment step in the Business Dimensional Lifecycle is where the three parallel development tracks come back together. This is the great unveiling of the DW/BI system to the business community. The quality of this first impression will strongly influence the acceptance of the systemand you get only one shot at it. Like any big event, there are a lot of details that must fall into place in order for the show to be successful.

Figure 14.1: The Deployment step in the Business Development Lifecycle

Most systems professionals think of deployment as moving code from development to test to production. As far as it goes, theyre correct: Deploying code and data to the production servers is a fundamental part of providing end-user access. But the system deployment is only about half of the deployment story. The deployment step in the Lifecycle includes all the pieces needed to give the business users access to the information, and much of this effort starts early in the Lifecycle. While youre creating the architecture and building the data warehouse and the BI applications, you must also be creating documentation, preparing training, and organizing the user support processes. All these operational services need to be in place before the curtain goes up for the first time.

This chapter is split into two parts : The first concentrates on the system deployment process and the second spotlights all the other critical but less technical activities needed to ensure a successful deployment.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What needs to be tested in the DW/BI system before deployment?

• How and where should you perform that testing?

• Whats the easiest way to deploy the completely new DW/BI system, and how can you safely test and deploy changes to an existing system?

• Why is DW/BI documentation important, and what documentation does your team need to write?

• What kind of support and training will your users need?