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Can you suggest some parameters and benchmarks against which a data warehouse implementation should be measured before accepting it?

Question: Can you suggest some parameters and benchmarks against which a data warehouse implementation should be measured before accepting it?

Sid Adelman’s Answer: Thanks for the question. I wish more organizations established such parameters and benchmarks. Here are a few to consider:

  1. Does it perform with the expected heavy load of concurrent users? A benchmark should give you this information. You want to be able to handle your expected load without the users’ response time being negatively impacted.
  2. Are your internal people properly trained or do you have to continue to rely on an outside consultant/contractor?
  3. Have your business analysts and business users signed off on your deliverable? Do they like the business intelligence (BI) tool?
  4. Was the user training successful? Have you been able to measure the effectiveness of the training?
  5. How well do the tools (extract, transform and load (ETL), database management system (DBMS), BI) work together?
  6. And finally, have your data warehouse goals and objectives been achieved? How well do you comply with your project agreement? This is agreement between IT and the business indicating what will be delivered, by when, who pays the bills, responsibilities, service level agreements and anything else that is substantive to the project.


Sid Adelman is a principal in Sid Adelman & Associates, an organization specializing in planning and implementing data warehouses, in data warehouse and BI assessments, and in establishing effective data architectures and strategies. He is a regular speaker at DW conferences. Adelman chairs the "Ask the Experts" column on www.dmreview.com. He is a frequent contributor to journals that focus on data warehousing. He co-authored Data Warehouse Project Management and is the principal author on Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts and Data Strategy. He can be reached at (818) 783-9634 or sid@sidadelman.com. Visit his Web site at www.sidadelman.com.

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