Data Warehouse Revisions

Other than to deploy a data warehouse, the discussion so far has centered around reports from the transactional database. But reporting from the transactional database is not the only option for retrieving and presenting Blackbaud CRM data. Reporting from the data warehouse reduces the load on the transactional database. The ETL process used by the data warehouse helps you to move data into structures which are more "report-friendly." The ETL process also provides at point at which to move calculations. This can also reduce the load on the transactional database and SQL Server Reporting Services reports.

The data warehouse does not convey every item in the transactional database. However, the data warehouse does support an extension process through which you can introduce additional data structures and Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes to populate the structures. ETL is covered in SSIS Packages for ETL. This section covers the revisions process to create database structures in the data warehouse.