Principles underlying BIReady The following principles have guided the development of BIReady:
Fully 'Model Driven' A model is a business information model. It can be specified in terms of one of the various conceptual modeling paradigms: ERM, UML, ORM, FCO-IM, CWM, etc. Even RM (relational model) by reengineering. This model is augmented with parameters that steer the generation of the data warehouse and the processes. E.g. which type of history one wants for a relation or an atribute. Absolute Flexibility One should be able to adjust a Data Warehouse and the Data Marts, which are already populated with data and in production, simply by changing the Business model according to new and changed Business requirements. Procedures and programs for reorganizing the data are, if necessary, generated by the tool as well. Fully Support for History Full support for all kinds of history of data. Not only simply keeping track of changes, but also the so-called ‘History of History’ in the case that there can be changes with retroactive effect and it is a business requirement to be able to still now what we once thought to be true about the history of an object, but nowadays we know better (or at least according to the latest changes we think to know better). Scalabilty By separating (hiding) the conceptual aspects of the Business requirements from the technical aspects of the underlying Data Base Management Systems it is possible to fully exploit the possibilities of the latter, without the need of hiring performance specialists of the DBMS products. This knowledge is build in the tool and can simply be managed and tuned by adjusting the appropriate parameters Orthogonality for the DBMS’s Each supported Database System can be used for each ‘Area’ of the tool. Areas are: Repository Area; Work Area of the tool itself, DWH Area; Data Mart Areas; Source data Areas. Of course the one combination makes more sense than the other, but it is perfectly possible to have one or more repositories in MS Access, while generating the Data Warehouse and its procedures in e.g. Oracle Independent support for different DBMSs Supported Database Systems are:                                                                        Microsoft SQL Server                                                                                                  Oracle                                                                                                                             IBM DB2 Netezza                                                                                                                    Teradata                                                                                                                         MySQL The list of supported products will quickly grow in the future.
The structure of the (generated) data warehouse and the data marts are based on the combined ideas of Ralph Kimball (Star schemas) Michael Schmitz (DNF: Dimensional Normal form) Dan Lindstedt (DataVault). For the effective processing of the changes a patent pending algorithm is used called ‘mopping’. Although the product is not positioned as an ETL-tool, in most cases there is no need for additional ETL tools. Simple upfront mapping with a variety of type of source data is all is needed.