Hi Greg,

I meant ODS is a rather malleable/morphable concept that has been used for a lot different things......and was being used for a lot of things before it got named.....

ONE thing ODS is good for is supporting operational decision making.....

ANOTHER thing ODS is good for is for call center support because it has integrated customer information,

ANOTHER thing ODS is good for is to provide data integration for near real time operational systems as an alternative to EAI which is significantly more expensive....

Obviously it's possible to build it to do just one of these or many of these and more....

ODS is part of CIF for supporting operational decision making. Nowadays if a company is going for EDW and is not considering an ODS I recommend they build one before they build the EDW because they will build one after they build the EDW and it is much more expensive to do it in that order.....In one case of mine we made such a recommendation and the ODS became huge as the EDW withered a bit after a while and no-one really knew how to make proper use of it. (The staff who knew how to use it turned over...)

The modelling technique used.....generally 3NF like a normal transaction based application for the extra performance of updates. However, I see Ralph has published an article a while go discussing 'transaction processing' on a dimensional model... (This link courtesy for Chris

Busch)

However, I recently built a large ODS with the Sybase IWS dimensional model as the basis for the ODS. There are a number of IWS customers using IWS for ODS.

This situation evolved the same way ODSs evolved. Some customers bought IWS and implemented it as an EDW, then decided to build an ODS, and found they could break out the 'current' version of the data from IWS to make the ODS....a complete accident of evolution since IWS was developed as a DW model and it was found, in the real world of using it, it would support ODS processing for all but the most demanding of real time requirements.....As far as I know there is no IWS ODS for a Bank in place yet......because banks now want there ODS to be extremely close to real time...

And yes, pardon the 'soapbox'. I think we should use methodologies more...but customers just don't want to pay for them, so who's going to develop them?

Iterations is the best one available to purchase but so many companies build ODS/EDW with no formal methodology in place...or just as bad, sometimes they do buy the methodology and then won't use it because they want to do the project 'the way other projects are done around here'....

Best Regards

Peter Nolan

Data Warehousing Consultant

Mobile: +353 879 581 732

From: "Greg Della-Croce" <SolutionBuilder2002@hotmail.com>

So Peter you are saying that since ODS is a very malleable tool, used for a

lot of different things, that there is something wrong. OK, I can buy

that

if you mean that we could/should standardize the architecture of the ODS

some more. But like RDBMS, that it has grown out of, ODS is just a

tool.

Or am I missing the point of if ODS must be CD/Bus or 3NF arch?

Greg