Getting Started with Data Warehousing and BI Analytics

Welcome to your first module! This module provides a gentle but thorough introduction to data warehouse systems, data lakes, and data marts. When you complete this module, you’ll be able to identify and compare data warehouse systems, data mart, and data lake architecture, and understand how organizations can benefit from each of these three data storage entities. Optionally, you’ll explore the workings of IBM Db2 data warehouse system architecture, view use cases, and understand the key capabilities and integrations available with IBM Db2 Warehouse. Then, you’ll learn about three types of data warehouse systems and popular data warehouse system vendors. You will be ready to help your organization assess new data warehouse system offerings when you know the five essential, critical criteria, including total cost of ownership, to evaluate before changing to a new data warehouse system.

In this knowledge-packed module, you’ll explore general and reference enterprise data warehousing architecture. You’ll discover how data cubes relate to star schemas. Then you’ll learn how to slice, dice, drill up or down, roll up, and pivot relative to data cubes. Next, you will examine the capabilities of materialized views, their benefits, and how to apply them. You’ll learn how data organization using facts and dimensions and their related tables organizes information. Then, you will explore how to use normalization to create a snowflake schema as an extension of the star schema. You will learn about populating a data warehouse, incremental data updates, verifying data, querying data, interpreting an entity-relationship diagram for a star schema, creating a materialized view, and applying the CUBE and ROLLUP options. ​You’ll also discover how organizations can benefit by implementing staging.

In this module, you’ll fast-track your data analytics learning and gain hands-on data analytics experience using IBM Cognos Analytics. After registering with Cognos Analytics, you’ll explore the platform’s capabilities by creating visualizations, building a simple dashboard, and trying out its advanced features.