Quick Tips for Managing Your Data Warehouse

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We’ve collected questions that have come across the Asterisk Intelligence desk and have put together a series of tips for your organization to manage your Asterisk Intelligence Data Warehouse (DW).  Ongoing attention to data quality and established procedures can help avoid a messy or frustrating database down the road. So without further ado, here are our tips:

  1. Go ahead and delete those old tables.  It’s been a couple of months… do you still need that table holding the target audience from last quarter’s marketing campaign?  Maybe if you’re still doing a static pool analysis on that group, but probably not.  Stay ahead of the volume in your Data Warehouse with a monthly review (or bi-weekly, if you have a high volume) to delete non-essential tables.
  2. Give it a description!  Every table needs a description.  Train down the habit of reviewing and maintaining any table’s description after every query build or upload.  Make sure staff who build queries are aware that they can input a table description for each step of their query within the ‘Choose Output’ settings of any query definition.
  3. Cut the clutter with a query-building trick!  When you build a string query that needs its final output stored in the Data Warehouse, don’t set up every step of the string query to save its output in the DW.  Only set the very last step for output to FILExxDW. Remember, QUERYxx tables will purge on a regular basis, so the Data Warehouse is best for long-term storage of key custom data tables.
  4. Know what “access” means (and refer to our chart for assistance).  The Data Warehouse solution opens library authority controls to credit union users for the very first time.  It can be tough to keep track of the nuances – click here to check out our chart, which breaks down the layers of user authority that every database administrator or security officer needs to know.
  5. Create rules for uploading and share these rules internally.  Ensure that you are putting good data into the system by establishing a set of rules and a review process for all files which will be uploaded to the Data Warehouse.

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