If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.
There actually are some fairly good data warehouse tutorials on the net. But I'd rather read a good book (like philg's, for example), so go out and buy Ralph Kimball's. He's the one who really understood that a *big* business opportunity existed where Oracle and DB2 (not to mention older "legacy" databases) feared to tread -- producing sales reports. Actually his stuff is good and readable and full of useful examples and even a little mini-warehouse system he wrote in Microsoft Access (a feat worth a medal in itself).I went to a technical presentation at the Oregon Graduate Institute about a year ago -- their public seminars used to be on things like the internals of Chorus (an early-90s French variant of Mach) or n-dimensional object-oriented whoozis or whatever. Now that it's the Era of the Net, of course, these talks have turned into thinly disguised marketing pitches.
And at this one, the pitch was for a local company developing a "data cube" front-end analysis too...
Only a couple days after my last comment, I was paging through the October 27 issue of Information Week and came across a Tandem ad, running double-truck across pages 54-55:[First, you have to imagine a large thirty-ish guy standing in a doorway, wearing a diaper. Ok, got that?]
"AT 6:32 PM EVERY WEDNESDAY, OWEN BLY BUYS DIAPERS AND BEER. DO NOT JUDGE OWEN. ACCOMMODATE HIM."
"If a data mining query discovers that between 6 and 8pm men buy diapers and beer, chances are you'll see more diapers and beer. It's with this kind of valuable -- and sometimes odd -- information that Tandem is helping people in retail, banking, telecommunications and insurance uncover business opportunities."
This also uncovers a recurring theme in modern data processing, one that changed the traditional acronym of GIGO from "garbage in/garbage out" to "garbage in/gospel out".
http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/jargon/jargon_21.html