Starting question about DW

[crashc123]

I have Huge amounts of paper reports, reference material, drawings, electronic reports(Word and PDF), and pictures(digital and paper). I want to put this all into a database that is searchable and later to be able to compare and analyze some of the stuff. I was thinking that Data Warehousing is the way to go or at least start with something small with this as a long term goal. Are there any out of the box solutions that you would recommend. I nedd to get all the above information at least accessable and cataloged. It would reduce my time by finding a report semilar to the one I need and go from there instead of starting from strack everytime.

I know that this is a long term deal, I just need to figure outr where to start. Such as What kind of format should I use to even make paper reports into elctronic ones. Is there a standard?

Any and all responses are very appreciated
Thank
Sonya

 

[BillDHS]

The experience I have is with a normalized relational data warehouse. If I understand you correctly, you want to store documents and pictures. I don't believe a traditional data warehouse is your solution. Nerritives and pictures don't store well. I would think you would be more interested in a cateloging or library type of application. Maybe with an XML interface or front end.

 

[Shek]

A datawarehouse is always supposed to be denormalized.But what Bill suggests is right. You need a normalized "database" where all the tables are properly indexed. Analysis of data calls for a datawarehouse generally but I am not sure how you can analyze and compare the stuff if its not simple numerical or text based. I suppose you are talking about visual analysis(??)
So I think plain databases like Oracle, SQL Server, is the way to go..

 

[jshree]

Sonya,
What you need to build is a kind of a document management system. For example, using Oracle RDBMS build a normalized set of tables that store these unstructured data (using LOB/BLOB type). For a GUI front end, build an Oracle forms application that uses OLE2 objects to store and access word documents. Or, better still, use one of Accelio's work flow management solutions that provides a rich set of document management tools. At this point, I don't think you need any kind of OLAP solutions. That is when you would consider building a data warehouse. Hope this info helps. Let me know if you need more info on doing this.