Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
for business managers to understand what is involved in maintaining the
technical environment. This is intended to provide a high-level view of what
needs to happen.
Once the data warehouse is built, it is important to keep all of its different
components current, including any patches and new maintenance releases.
Some organizations work actively with their vendors to get corrections to bugs
and to push for enhancements. These organizations often partner with their
vendors to beta test their new product releases or to install these new releases
soon after they become available. Some organizations just like to push the
envelope. Others find themselves forging ahead because they need the new
product features to help them address their own business objectives.
Not all organizations are up to the challenge of getting involved with early
releases of products. This is fine. You can monitor the results of other organiza-
tions. This can be accomplished by networking with other organizations that
are using the same technologies. You can also participate in local or national
user groups for that product. These groups typically work closely with the
vendors (and may even be sponsored by them) and are well informed about
the availability of new releases and any current issues. For example, if many
installation problems are occurring, you can wait a little longer to ensure that
the new product release is stable. Once the release is fairly stable, go ahead
and install it.
The Importance of Testing
Keep in mind that you can minimize risk by setting up a good test environ-
ment. In general, it is always important to have a good test environment (as
recommended in Chapter 9), and even more so when adopting new technology
early. This enables your organization to ensure that the new software will not
break anything else in your environment. If it does, the problem can be studied
and resolved without affecting your production data warehouse environment.
This also enables your staff to learn to use the new features of this release. You
should expect to find problems with the products, but you can play a critical
role to ensure that they are fixed and that the new features work properly.
The test environment is also used by the ETL and BI developers for their
work. If there is a lot of development activity, then consider setting up an
isolated test environment dedicated to testing software releases. Depending
upon the level of other development efforts and the frequency of software
releases, this additional test environment may need to be permanent.
Falling Behind
The worst-case scenario is when an organization has not kept up with releases
at all. Over a number of years, a significant gap can develop between the current
product and the version that you are running. Eventually, support for older
