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,
-Sean
Can 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.googlegro ups.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/...0/Default.aspx
The best book on architecture is the Corporate Information Factory book
by Bill et al.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...700697-6194236
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

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

Best Enterprise Datawarehouse

We currently run a MASSIVE enterprise data warehouse on SQL Server 2000 and it is struggling a bit with both user queries and daily loads.
Need opinions on
1. Is SQL Server the best product for the job
2. What are the alternatives
CheersWhat is massive ? Also, what is your hardware specs ?|||And what are you doing with it? Are you creating cubes off of it?|||Have about 7 + Terabytes of data - growing at 100 gb a month

Team of dedicated App Dev staff designing and developing OLAP cubes and publishing on the intranet using third party software|||What type of cubes ? What version of sql are you using ?|||What window do you have available to perform the daily loads? Approx how long does each load take?|||At that size I am sure MS would love to help you (and use you in their marketing :) )|||You can easily deploy SQL Analaysis Services in this case, check ver 2000 for more enhancements and information on MS SQL homepage.

HTH|||No one seems to have opinions on any other products other than SQL Server? I guess it is a SQL Server forum but like I have already said - this is our current platform and is Struggling !!!!|||Originally posted by aldo_2003
Have about 7 + Terabytes of data - growing at 100 gb a month

Team of dedicated App Dev staff designing and developing OLAP cubes and publishing on the intranet using third party software

Gotta ask...what's the subject of the data?

3rd party software?

I don't think (damn it, again) that ANY 3rd party software plans for anything that massive...

And EVERYONE is writting adhoc queries...right?

"This sounds like a job for "Super-Silver bullet""

And yes, MS would love to talk to you....|||Originally posted by aldo_2003
No one seems to have opinions on any other products other than SQL Server? I guess it is a SQL Server forum but like I have already said - this is our current platform and is Struggling !!!!

Be happy using Sybase IQ (http://www.sybase.com/products/bi/sybaseiq) !
=> T-SQL compliance
=> DSS database
=> performance++|||You have given very few information regarding your environment and the reasons you are struggling, other blaming SQL. We would be glad to help you if you could tell us more about your data warehouse. So we can see where your bottleneck is. But if you are looking for the answer of 'Yes, you need to switch to O.... and S.. platform', please go to O.... forum. Thanks.