Dimitrios Apostolopoulos was born in 18/08/1978.
Lives in Athens.
Is the father of two boys, six and two and a half years old.
Studied in Athens University of Economics and Business (Department of Informatics).
Is a candidate certified Data Scientist (John Hopkins University).
Works since 2005 in the banking industry (Bank of Cyprus, Piraeus Bank) as a full stack Business Intelligence Developer with participation in many projects regarding data warehousing, reporting, OLAP, analytics, credit controls (Pimco, Black Rock), etc.
https://gr.linkedin.com/in/dapostolop
https://twitter.com/dapostolopoylos
Lecturer’s profile
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What is a Data Warehouse?
• Late '80s, Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy ("The business data
warehouse").
• It's founding concept was to create an architectural model for the
flow of data from the operational systems to the decision support
environments.
• A system used for reporting and data analysis.
• Central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate
sources.
• Current and historical data.
• ETL (Extract, Transform, Load).
• The main goal of creating and maintaining a DWH is to have data
that is cleaned, transformed, cataloged and available for use by
business professionals for data mining, online analytical
processing, market research and decision support.
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What is a Data Warehouse?
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What is Business Intelligence, what can you do with it?
• Business intelligence (BI) is often described as "the set of
techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into
meaningful and useful information for business analysis
purposes".
• BI technologies are capable of handling large amounts of
unstructured data to help identify, develop and otherwise
create new strategic business opportunities.
• The goal of BI is to allow for the easy interpretation of these
large volumes of data. Identifying new opportunities and
implementing an effective strategy based on insights can
provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and
long-term stability.
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A few basic concepts: Data, Metadata, Data Cube, Data Marts
• Data is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative
variables.
• Data is measured, collected and reported, and analyzed,
whereupon it can be visualized using graphs or images.
• As a general concept refers to the fact that some existing
information or knowledge is represented or coded in
some form suitable for better usage or processing.
• Closely related to the concepts of information and
knowledge but not the same.
• Data is collected and analyzed to create information
suitable for making decisions, while knowledge is
derived from extensive amounts of experience dealing
with information on a subject.
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A few basic concepts: Data, Metadata, Data Cube, Data Marts
• Metadata is "data that provides information about other
data".
• Structural metadata is data about the containers of
data (File size, location, etc).
• Descriptive metadata uses individual instances of
application data or the data content (Purpose of the
data, author of the data, etc).
• One of the first forms of metadata were the card catalogs
in libraries.
• The main purpose of metadata is to facilitate in the
discovery of relevant information.
• Helps organize electronic resources, provide digital
identification, support archiving and preservation of the
resource.
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A few basic concepts: Data, Metadata, Data Cube, Data Marts
• A data cube (or OLAP cube) is a term that typically
refers to a multi-dimensional array of data, a multi-
dimensional generalization of a spreadsheet.
• For example, a company might wish to summarize
financial data by product, by time-period, and by city to
compare actual and budget expenses. Product, time, city
and scenario (actual and budget) are the data's
dimensions.
• Each cell of the cube holds a number that represents
some measure of the business, such as sales, profits,
expenses, budget and forecast.
• The elements of a dimension can be organized as a
hierarchy, a set of parent-child relationships, typically
where a parent member summarizes its children.
• Basic operations: slice, dice, drill down, roll up, pivot.
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A few basic concepts: Data, Metadata, Data Cube, Data Marts
Let’ s see how an OLAP cube looks like! The online OLAP example in RadarSoft’ s site will give you a
pretty good taste of what all these terms like dimensions, measures, slice and dice, really mean!
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A few basic concepts: Data, Metadata, Data Cube, Data Marts
• A data mart is a simple form of a data warehouse that is
focused on a single subject (or functional area), such as
sales, finance or marketing.
• Data marts are often built and controlled by a single
department within an organization.
• Given their single-subject focus, data marts usually draw
data from only a few sources.The sources could be
internal operational systems, a central data warehouse, or
external data.
• Data marts improve end-user response time by allowing
users to have access to the specific type of data they need
to view most often by providing the data in a way that
supports the collective view of a group of users.
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What is OLAP?
• 1993, Edgar F. Codd
• OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) performs
multidimensional analysis of business data and provides
the capability for complex calculations, trend analysis
and sophisticated data modeling.
• MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP)
• ROLAP (Relational OLAP)
• It is the foundation for many kinds of business
applications for Business Performance Management,
Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Financial Reporting,
Analysis, etc.
• OLAP enables end-users to perform ad hoc analysis of
data in multiple dimensions, thereby providing the
insight and understanding they need for better decision
making.
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Real life project example
DWH migration in Bank of Cyprus
• Business need Daily update of the DWH and data
enrichment.
• Existing situation Outdated technology, long loading
time, difficult to apply any changes due to company
policies and technical boundaries, low rate of the
information utilization.
• Solution ETL and database migration, complete
modification of the architectural model, use of advanced
technics for table partitioning, database mirroring, user
security policies, etc, new reporting and analytical
environment (BI portal).
• Aftermath High rate of end user satisfaction, small
loading time, high query performance, easy and fast ad
hoc reporting, ability to create more sophisticated BI
projects, better insights/decision making.
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Real life project example
Cash Flow Monitoring in Piraeus Bank
• Business need Because of the financial situation there
was the need to monitor and analyze the cash flow around
the clock.
• Existing situation The information existed in many
different applications and systems and it wasn’ t analyzed
as it should be or it wasn’t at all.
• Solution Creation of a data mart with all the data from
various sources integrated. Data analysis, trend lines,
alerts. Three times a day a full multi page analysis with
charts and reports is sent automatically to a group of
users who belong in the C level.
• Aftermath Management had a clear view of the cash
available, better decision making, better customer
service.
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Career paths in DWH/BI
• There is a broad range of career paths due to the nature
of the subject.
• According to someone’s preferences you can be:
• Database specialist, administrator, developer or
architect.
• Data Warehouse / ETL specialist, a DWH architect or
a DWH developer.
• Analytics specialist (Performance Management)
• Reporting specialist
• Web specialist
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