Tony Rogerson's ramblings on SQL Server

I was talking with Mark Whitehorn at dinner after last Tuesdays Microsoft Data Management Conference and we got talking about the MSc in Business Intelligence he's setting up through Dundee University.

Looks really interesting and something I'm going sign up for today, just hope they'll take my 23 years of experience instead of a degree (I come from the school of life) starting in IT at 16, serving an apprenticeship and working my way up the ranks.

Anyway details below; if you are interested then email Mark directly: markwhitehorn@computing.dundee.ac.uk

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/business_intelligence_msc.htm

The MSc comprises six modules:

1 BI Systems – introduction and overview
2 Relational database design
3 Dimensional database design
4 Designing BI systems
5 ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) – Theory and practice
6 MDX (Multi-Dimensional BLOCKED EXPRESSION


1 BI Systems – introduction and overview
Why do we need BI systems?
Background and history of their development
Characters, data, information, knowledge, wisdom
Turning data into information
Why this is so important
Two main problems
Data is physically dispersed
Bring it together with a data warehouse
Data is not information
Turn it into information

2 Relational database design
User, logical, physical models of transactional systems
Primary keys, foreign keys and joins
Indexing
Implementation

3 Dimensional database design
Turning analytical requirements into a data model
User, logical, physical models of analytical systems
Surrogate keys
Slowly changing dimensions – types 0-3
Degenerate dimensions
Data mining

4 Designing BI systems
Kimball vs. Inmon
Teradata vs. Microsoft
Choosing the initial projects
Sponsor
Politics
The role of the BI architect
Good interface design

5 ETL – Theory and Practice
Systems of record
The meaning of the data
Bulk insert
Pipeline vs. Staging

6 MDX
The language of analysis
SQL vs MDX
Queries vs. Data manipulation
MDX expressions
Tuples vs. Sets