Data Model for Blackbaud Data Warehouse and OLAP

Blackbaud's Infinity applications perform most actions on an Infinity database. This transactional database holds constituent, fundraising, and revenue data among other items. A separate data warehouse database can be deployed from some Infinity applications such as Blackbaud CRM. Blackbaud Data Warehouse database data is based on transactional data from an Infinity database. But it is structured so that multidimensional queries are returned quickly. In turn, OLAP cubes can be created based on the Blackbaud Data Warehouse database.

You can think about Blackbaud Data Warehouse as a set of abstractions of transactional data. At the lowest level, there is data in the transactional database, an Infinity database. A level above that is data in the BBDW database. Then there are Transact-SQL views of the BBDW tables. Finally, there is the BBDW OLAP cube.

Extensions to BBDW follow a similar stack. At the lowest level are Infinity customizations. A level above that are revisions extensions to a BBDW database. Then there views of BBDW database tables created through extensions. Finally, there are extensions to a BBDW OLAP cube.