Project Name SunLink Sales Reports

Client Group Division Sales

Duration May 1998 - Mar 2000

Description
The reporting project was a spin-off of the client-server development project "SunLink" for the US Group Division. SunLink was a major effort, affecting not only systems, but also business process redesign. The division was restructured several times during the course of the project.

Originally not scoped, it turned out that reporting was a key component of the solution. Christian was asked to lead the design and creation of a data warehouse. He was new to the subject of Data Warehousing and had to get up to speed quickly.

Christian hired one permanent Actuate developer and two consultants. He evaluated DTL tools to extract data from the operational database into the warehouse and decided to use SQL Server stored procedures instead. The source data was highly normalized and data points had to be calculated. The transformation logic was too complex for any commercial tool. He created the database design, a complex star schema. He worked with the database administrator and wrote several hundred kilobytes of stored procedure code himself (example). Because of the complexity of the transformation process, performance was key. Christian spent a significant amount of time with performance tuning of the database and the procedures.

Christian also wrote the end user documentation for the online reports in HTML. The documentation was available upon click on the help icon in the reports.

Christian presented the project at the Actuate User's Conference 1999 in San Francisco.

Technology Used

Actuate 4.0

MS SQL Server 6.5

Other Information
View a sample report. The Actuate 4.0 Report Viewer must be installed. It can be downloaded from Actuate free of charge.
Alternatively, here is a screen shot.


Project Name	SunLink Sales Reports
Client	Group Division Sales
Duration	May 1998 - Mar 2000
Description	The reporting project was a spin-off of the client-server development project "SunLink" for the US Group Division. SunLink was a major effort, affecting not only systems, but also business process redesign. The division was restructured several times during the course of the project. Originally not scoped, it turned out that reporting was a key component of the solution. Christian was asked to lead the design and creation of a data warehouse. He was new to the subject of Data Warehousing and had to get up to speed quickly. Christian hired one permanent Actuate developer and two consultants. He evaluated DTL tools to extract data from the operational database into the warehouse and decided to use SQL Server stored procedures instead. The source data was highly normalized and data points had to be calculated. The transformation logic was too complex for any commercial tool. He created the database design, a complex star schema. He worked with the database administrator and wrote several hundred kilobytes of stored procedure code himself (example). Because of the complexity of the transformation process, performance was key. Christian spent a significant amount of time with performance tuning of the database and the procedures. Christian also wrote the end user documentation for the online reports in HTML. The documentation was available upon click on the help icon in the reports. Christian presented the project at the Actuate User's Conference 1999 in San Francisco.
Technology Used	Actuate 4.0 MS SQL Server 6.5
Other Information	View a sample report. The Actuate 4.0 Report Viewer must be installed. It can be downloaded from Actuate free of charge. Alternatively, here is a screen shot.