Question

we have intra-day Data Warehouse loads through the day (using SSIS, SQL Server 2005).

The reporting is done through Business Objects (XI 3.1 WebI).

We are not currently facing any issues, but what are the Best Practices for intra-day Data Warehouse loads, where at the same time Reporting from the same Database?

thanks,
Amrit

Answer 1

Not sure If I understood you correctly, but I guess that the two main problems you may be facing are:

• data availability: your users may want to query data that you have temporary removed because you’re refreshing it (…this depends on your data loading approach).

• performance: The reporting may be affected by the data loading processes.

If your data is partitioned, I think it would be a nice approach to use a partitioned switch based data load.
You perform the data load on a staging partition that contains the data that you’re reloading (while the datawarehouse partition is still available with all the data for the users). Then, once you have finished loading the data in your staging partition, you can immediately switch the partitions between staging and the datawarehouse. This will solve the data availability problem and could help reducing the performance one (if for instance your staging partition is on a different hard-drive than the datawarehouse).

more info on partitioned data load and other data loading techniques here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd425070(v=sql.100).aspx