ISM 420 Data Modeling and Warehousing

This course will focus on the data warehousing concepts and the general architecture of data warehousing systems, including data marts. Students will learn the business drivers for deciding to make an investment in data warehousing. The course will include a review of the entity-relationship/domain class modeling techniques used in the design of the transactional databases that provide the source of data for data warehouses. Students will learn how to create dimensional data models to design data warehouses. In addition, students will develop an understanding of the ETL (extract, transform, load) processes for extracting data from multiple sources and converting the data into a consistent format, based upon the reference data standards, for consolidation in the data warehouse. The students will be introduced to the Business Intelligence (BI) concepts of OLAP and data mining that are generally used in conjunction with data warehouses. This course will focus on the implications of different data warehousing technologies on the use of BI techniques. A separate course will explore Business Intelligence applications in depth