SeETL Demonstration 01 The SeETL Workbook 1/3/2012

Introduction  History of the Workbook  Introduction to the workbook  Processing of the workbook  Summary

History of the Workbook  Early 90s mappings documented in text/script  A little while on MS Word was being used  By 98 people started moving to Excel sheets  Prism Solutions had a good mapping workbook in Iterations  By 2002 DWs had 100+ tables and 2,000+ fields  Excel sheets were becoming unworkable  An innovation in 2003 enabled all mappings to be collapsed into one worksheet  We could now map an unlimited amount of columns  In 2004 moved to excel xml storage and manipulation of the XML as source code input for generation  2004 – present day - extending the workbook

Introduction to the Workbook  At first it seems a little “unreal” or “unbelievable”  How can excel be used to create a data warehouse?  The excel sheet is stored as xml, read and processed by a vb.net application.  Anything that can be expressed into excel can become “source code” for generation of code or data in the dw  There are very few things this is not true of  Stored procedures and the reports themselves  So let us go through the worksheets one by one

Processing of the Workbook  A small vb app  Read the xml  Observes the processing directives and connections  Processes the xml as directed  Anything available to vb is available to be added to this application  The possibilities are quite endless  The future of BI is excel sheets defining everything that is needed.

Summary  History of the Workbook  Introduction to the workbook  Processing of the workbook  Summary