I’m currently on a PDW training and I’d like to share some of the concepts when building a Data Warehouse on PDW.

For those who are not familiar with PDW this is Microsoft’s first step into the MPP architecture. SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse is is a highly scalable appliance for enterprise data warehousing and it can be used for massively scale out scenarios up to hundreds of Terabytes. Enterprise Data Warehouse are typically used within a hub & spoke architecture, as shown in the following picture.

In this kind of architecture the Enterprise Data Warehouse (hub) is the central store of source system data. The spokes are typical used for reporting purposes, like regional reporting and high performance reporting, and fed by the central hub with data.

I will explain the PDW architecture in detail in further posts, as well as data base design, loading strategies and querying techniques. So stay tuned.