Best practices for reporting: Replicated servers + data warehouse server?

Good afternoon,
Lately there has been discussion of what the best practice would be for
enterprise reporting needs. Specifically, we currently have online OLTP
servers for our business apps, as well as a data warehouse server.
A member of our team has suggested that we create a new server farm (or
server) for real time reporting to alleviate the real time reporting
burden off the production servers.
I was looking for any advice or pointers to design a topology that can
support our current real time systems as well as data warehousing
needs, while still minimizing the burden of reporting against our live
production servers.
The mention of replication has come to mind, but I'm not completely
sold on attempting to replicate our production data for the "heck of
it"...
Any thoughts?
Best regards,
-SeanCan you specify requirements for the reporting data? What would be the
maximum latency involved? I assume that reporting from dw isnt good enough
beacause of the latency...
MC
"Sean Aitken" <sean.aitken@.gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1139858184.012942.18310@.g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Good afternoon,
> Lately there has been discussion of what the best practice would be for
> enterprise reporting needs. Specifically, we currently have online OLTP
> servers for our business apps, as well as a data warehouse server.
> A member of our team has suggested that we create a new server farm (or
> server) for real time reporting to alleviate the real time reporting
> burden off the production servers.
> I was looking for any advice or pointers to design a topology that can
> support our current real time systems as well as data warehousing
> needs, while still minimizing the burden of reporting against our live
> production servers.
> The mention of replication has come to mind, but I'm not completely
> sold on attempting to replicate our production data for the "heck of
> it"...
> Any thoughts?
> Best regards,
> -Sean
>|||Good morning MC,
There aren't any real specific requirements at this time. But, we do
have the need to ensure that real time reporting doesn't impact
production systems. Apparently, there are some applications that have
caused problems against performance of real time systems with some
reports.
I'm more of less just looking for some existing topology patterns that
have been proven to satisfy the needs of the business. Our organization
has about 2000 employees all over the world, and we have many systems
in place, SQL Server as well as Oracle.
My personal feeling is that any real time reporting be designed with
performance in mind and anything else should pull from the data
warehouse, with the granularity as designed into the reporting and
model requirements.
I wish I had a good case example, but my main motivation for
approaching this issue is that another developer on our team made a
proposal to actuall replicate the entire prod environment for all real
time reporting. I'm having a hard time buying into that idea.
Thanks for any insight!
Cheers!
-Sean|||Hi Sean,
sure.....there are some useful books to read on my beginners page.
http://www.peternolan.com/Beginners...40/Default.aspx
The best book on architecture is the Corporate Information Factory book
by Bill et al.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...5700697-6194236
Though for some reason Amazons links are not working at the moment.
CIF is a well defined and well articulated architecture for designers
to take into consideration when building end to end Information
Infrastructure for sizable companies. Well worth reading...
Peter|||Thank you very much Peter!
I'll be checking them out today!
Cheers!
-Sean