Best Practices for Data Warehouse Database Developers

I believe data warehousing is here to stay. It is the only place where you can keep track of your history and changes that has happened. I further believe that we are on the verge of building data warehouses that will outlast several ERP changes. Why? Well, for many it still comes as a nasty surprise that you will have to rebuild your warehouse every time you change one of the surrounding systems. Only in the last few years have we found methods to model our warehouses with the flexibility necessary to cope with changes like these.

In the present situation what we have to do is get best practices for data warehouse  development..while developing data warehouses we have to keep in mind these best practices  so that the result will be perfect..here are they..

• Make sure you are provided with a usable data dictionary before starting heavy-duty development

• Save query plans, run times and performance benchmarks in the database

• Save ETL, validation and processing errors in shared database tables

• Avoid long-running transactions

• Use referential integrity carefully

• Learn to recognize when the law of diminishing returns is in effect

• Always understand your database's optimizer and query plans

• Know the limitations of your ETL tool

• Be involved in planning physical environments for testing, QA and migration