Description

This curriculum spans the technical and organisational complexity of a multi-workshop data warehouse implementation, addressing the same design, governance, and operational challenges encountered in large-scale advisory engagements and internal platform modernisation programs.

Module 1: Defining Strategic Alignment and Business Requirements

Selecting source systems for integration based on business-critical KPIs and data availability constraints.
Negotiating data ownership and access rights with departmental stakeholders during requirement gathering.
Mapping regulatory reporting needs to dimensional models for auditability and traceability.
Deciding between real-time vs. batch ingestion based on SLA requirements and source system capabilities.
Documenting lineage expectations for executive dashboards to meet compliance standards.
Resolving conflicting definitions of revenue across finance and sales departments during data modeling.
Establishing data freshness thresholds for operational reporting versus analytical use cases.
Identifying high-impact data domains to prioritize in the initial warehouse rollout.

Module 2: Data Modeling for Analytical Performance

Choosing between star schema and data vault models based on volatility and audit requirements.
Designing conformed dimensions to ensure consistency across multiple business processes.
Implementing slowly changing dimension strategies (Type 1, 2, or 3) based on historical tracking needs.
Denormalizing fact tables to improve query performance on large datasets.
Handling degenerate dimensions from transactional systems without natural dimension attributes.
Modeling role-playing dimensions for dates, locations, or employees used in multiple contexts.
Defining grain for fact tables to prevent aggregation errors in reporting.
Managing surrogate key generation in distributed ETL environments.

Module 3: Data Integration and ETL Architecture

Selecting change data capture (CDC) methods based on source system capabilities (log-based, timestamp, triggers).
Configuring error handling and alerting for failed ETL jobs in production pipelines.
Optimizing incremental load logic to minimize processing time and resource consumption.
Implementing retry logic and backpressure handling in streaming data ingestion.
Designing staging layer structures to support reprocessing and debugging.
Validating data completeness and accuracy after transformation using row count and checksum checks.
Managing dependencies between interrelated ETL workflows using orchestration tools.
Securing credentials and connection strings in ETL configuration files.

Module 4: Data Quality and Validation Frameworks

Defining data quality rules for nulls, duplicates, and referential integrity in dimension tables.
Implementing automated data profiling during initial data onboarding.
Creating alert thresholds for anomaly detection in daily data volume and value ranges.
Handling mismatched data types during transformation from heterogeneous source systems.
Logging data quality violations without blocking downstream processing.
Reconciling discrepancies between source system totals and warehouse aggregates.
Establishing ownership for data issue resolution across business units.
Versioning data quality rules to track changes over time.

Module 5: Performance Optimization and Query Tuning

Designing partitioning strategies for large fact tables based on query patterns.
Creating and maintaining materialized views for frequently accessed aggregations.
Indexing dimension table keys and filtered columns to accelerate joins.
Configuring workload management rules to prioritize critical reporting queries.
Analyzing query execution plans to identify full table scans and bottlenecks.
Setting up statistics collection schedules for query optimizer accuracy.
Implementing result set caching for repetitive dashboard queries.
Balancing concurrency limits against resource utilization in shared environments.

Module 6: Security, Access Control, and Compliance

Implementing row-level security policies based on user roles and organizational units.
Masking sensitive PII data in development and testing environments.
Auditing access logs for queries involving financial or HR data.
Integrating with enterprise identity providers (e.g., Active Directory, SSO).
Enforcing encryption at rest and in transit for data in storage and transit.
Managing permissions for self-service BI tools connected to the warehouse.
Documenting data handling practices for GDPR, CCPA, or SOX compliance audits.
Defining data retention and archival policies for historical tables.

Module 7: Metadata Management and Data Governance

Populating technical metadata (source-to-target mappings, transformation logic) in a catalog.
Linking business glossary terms to physical database columns and reports.
Tracking data lineage from source systems to final dashboards for impact analysis.
Implementing data stewardship workflows for metadata updates and approvals.
Integrating with data catalog tools to support search and discovery.
Versioning ETL logic and schema changes in source control systems.
Automating metadata extraction from ETL jobs and database schemas.
Defining ownership and stewardship roles for critical data assets.

Module 8: Scalability, Cloud Migration, and Platform Selection

Evaluating cloud data warehouse platforms (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) based on concurrency and pricing models.
Migrating on-premise ETL jobs to cloud-native orchestration frameworks.
Designing multi-region data replication for disaster recovery and latency reduction.
Implementing auto-scaling policies for variable query workloads.
Estimating storage growth and planning for cost-effective tiering.
Refactoring legacy SQL for compatibility with cloud SQL dialects.
Managing cross-account access in multi-tenant cloud environments.
Assessing data egress costs when integrating with external analytics tools.