Data Warehouse Change Control 1

[basslure]

I am getting ready to turn a Data Warehouse project over to production. With a "production" system comes the baggage of Change Control. Our DW architecture allows users to create their own temporary tables within the DW and join those tables with the "production warehouse tables". How should such modifications to the DW be handled from a change control perspective? How are DW changes in general handled from a change control perspective?

 

[WHArchitect]

Whether you permit end users to create tables on the data warehouse or they export the data to some other platform for further processing, the impact is the same, with one exception. Over time, some of these user tables will tend to become "permanent". Users other than the ones who created them will come to depend on them. This will eventually lead to the same evils that your warehouse was created to remedy, inconsistancy and lack of documentation being at the head of the list. This is not a quantifiable risk. It is an absolute certainty. One way to head this off is to restrict access to these tables to the users who create them, unless you mean that these tables are literally temporary tables and will not survive the session during which they are created. I suspect from the way you framed your question that this is not the case. I assume you mean that certain "power" users will have "create" privileges. If this is the case, beware. Before too long, you, or the production staff charged with maintaining the warehouse, will be presented with a request to make a user table public. This will almost certainly put you in the position of rubber stamping a modification you know will have adverse consequences or criticizing the analytical skills of your client. This is also known as being between a rock and a hard place. Try not to go there.