Before companies can even begin to obtain some of the benefits of Business Intelligence (BI), they must first accept the fact that their disparate transaction systems cannot support the complex, integrated view of the business that is required. What is needed is a consistent store of up-to-date information that can be made available to the business—the data warehouse.

In this chapter, we cover the design and implementation of a data warehouse to support BI. We take a detailed look at the data modeling process and discuss the implementation of the relational tables using SQL Server features. We also give you guidance on securing the database and describe how to deploy and maintain the database.