2 Tier Architecture
This design permits efficient data extraction form operational databases with a minimum penalty over original systems to one or several staging databases while transform, clean and improve data quality which is stored on one or several datamarts. Evolving to this model permits to give decision services to specific departments that could have relevant importance to whole company activities.
With the appearance of datamarts, the obtained data starts to be arranged with some dimensionality and increased meanings.
With well-planed Business Intelligence architecture, these are some advantages of this design:
- Isolation of responsibilities and security issues over every data mart, which gives increased control over which users have access on certain information.
- Particular load processes with fine-tuned performance and fine-grained data transfers: more control over information quality.
- Controlled growth of Business Intelligence applications with more confidence and learning advantages.
However, this design could be too basic for large-organization analytics and enterprise-size Business Intelligence implementations because datamarts become poorly linked information islands. Also, a chaotic isolated development of staging areas and datamarts could produce situations of duplicated data, overloaded systems, lack of confidence on BI implementations and wasted resources.