The most popular conceptual standardization of data warehousing is known under the term Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) introduced by Bill Inmon. The most famous EDW demand is the propagation of a ‘single version of truth'. Further key words of the EDW concept are:
- extract once & deploy many
- support the ‘unknown'
- controlled redundancy
- corporate memory
- historical complete, comprehensive, granular
- integrated view
- ...
The EDW conceptual offering became popular in the BW community soon after market introduction. Designing a BW DWH based on EDW principles today nearly is a standard requirement for large BW implementations - corporate/enterprise view on information as answer to globalization. But as there is no copyright on the term EDW it showed that it was very difficult to streamline the way of introducing an EDW and to communicate on this topic. Furthermore customers focus with wide-spanning especially global BWs in addition on 24x7 operations, robustness, template development, corporate roll-out and of course overall scalability. These Topics relate very close to the BW functional offering thus they cannot be covered by the general EDW concept. These circumstances drove the introduction of a standard for large and/or global-scale BW-managed Data Warehouses - the BW Layered Scalable Architecture (LSA).
The LSA
- Offers design and implementation standards
- Collects years of SAP- and market-experiences (best practice)
- Is built on EDW principles
- Provides a common terminology