Business Intelligence Reporting Trap

It is not always wise to recreate reports from source systems in Data Warehouse. Chances are that you’ll make much more efforts and engage more resources to create report in DWH instead to make it in source system.

Why?

In order to recreate required report in Data Warehouse all data need to imported. Well, it can be in case of very complex source systems like trying to dig roots from very big tree. You need data basis, but it is not stored in one or several tables in source systems. Data reporting logic requires very detailed data from deep inside many tables. For one data column there is a need to combine several different tables, for second column other sets of tables and business logic is required. Each data requires deep digging through many tables, like digging tree roots.

In such cases recreation of report in DWH can be very frustrating, long and costly. Why all business information logic needs to be imported into DWH, just leave it where it is and create there report because reporting environment is already there, and it does not need to be moved. This is the trap, don’t jump into it!