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Contents of Project Reports

<< Course Project
Case Study: Agri-Data Warehouse >>
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In the context of sales and marketing, a prospect is someone who can become a customer. A
customer is someone who will buy a product or service form you. So every sales person is
looking for a customer or wants to convert a prospect into a customer. However, on an average
10% of the prospects become a customer, it means if you try 10 prospects, in the worst case the
last one will be the customer. Look at positively, meaning the more failures you have, the more
close you get to your customer. This is why the saying goes that "quitters never win, and winners
never quit". Similarly look at the work of Thomas Edison, he kept trying and untimely become
immortal i.e. his name still lives and his invention still used.
What if you are never entertained?
It may so happen that no one ente rtains/helps you, maybe you did not tried hard, maybe you had
the wrong attitude, maybe you did not meet the right people , maybe you were not very
convincing , maybe the end user was apprehensive etc.
Upto 10% less credit if this approach is adopted
In such a case, search the web, read books/magazines and pick any one of the 5 types of
organizations discussed and collect reference/related material (not beyond year 2000).
Use the material collected to write reports 2 to 6.
Now it may so happen, that you tried, and tried and tried very hard, but still unable to get a key
person interested and willing to help you so that you could write to write report_2. There could be
several reasons for this, maybe you don't tried hard, maybe it was because of the other person etc.
In such a case, you will do a lifecycle case study using the Internet. In report_2 you will list all
the reasons for failure and how you tried, and then we will decide about how much credit to
deduct from the semester project. The amount of deduction could be upto 10%. But you still have
to write all the reports and use the material from the case studies tailored to the requirements of
the reports. For this purpose you will have to download a number of focused case studies, better if
about the same organization, and compile the results in the form of the reports as per the Ralph
Kimball's road map.
Contents of Project Reports
The project reports to include, but is not limited to, the following:
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Narrative summary of results produced (report_1).
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Listings of computer models/programs coded and utilized (report_1).
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Reports displaying results (report_1).
§
System usage instructions (report_1).
§
Narrative description of business and tables of appropriate data
(report_4).
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Descriptions of decisions to be supported by information produced by
system (report_4).
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§
Structure charts, dataflow diagrams and/or other diagrams to document
the structure of the system (report 4-7).
§
Recommendations (reports 5-7)
This is self explanatory, and I have also explained in the lecture. Follow the guidelines to the
word, as your work will be graded based on these guidelines. Note that system usage instructions
have to be specific with screen shots of the application developed, so that your applications can
be executed using the instructions and graded. Don't forget to submit the entire source code,
along with the compiled code with all necessary libraries DLLs attached.
Format of Project Reports: Main
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Report No.
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Title of course, semester & submission date
·
Names and roll no. of project members.
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Campus and name of city.
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Table of contents.
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1-page executive summary for each report.
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Attach (scanned) hard/soft copies of all related material collected and referenced with
each report.
·
At the end of semester, combine ALL reports and submit as a single report.
Again this is self explanatory, and I have also explained in the lecture. Follow the guidelines to
the word, as your work will be graded based on these guidelines.
Format of Project Reports: Other
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No spelling or grammar mistakes.
·
Make sections and number them (as per contents of report discussed).
·
Pages should be numbered (bottom center).
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Add an index at the end of report.
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File name: RPT_no_semester_campus_rollno_CS614.doc
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e.g. RPT_1_F05_BestComputersWah_234,235_CS614.doc
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Email copy of report.
·
Warning:
­  Do not copy-paste, I can and I will catch you.
MS Word has a facility to create an index. You begin by creating a file with a list of keywords to
be listed in the index, and then go to Insert then Reference then In dex and Tables, press
AutoMark and select the file with keywords.
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The naming convention of the reports is important, so that your reports can be easily identified as
there are about half a dozen reports for each group. The following convention to be used in report
naming:
RPT: This will be repeated for each report and will not change.
no: is the report number i.e. 1 through 7
semester: is the semester, some possible semesters are F05 i.e. Fall 2005 or SP06 i.e. Spring
2006 or SPL05 i.e. special semester 2005 or SM06 i.e. summer 2006.
campus: The name of the VU campus where you are registered or taking the course along with
the name of the city or town. Write full name of the campus, do not use underscore i.e. _ or
dashes or space in the campus name.
rollno: Since it is a group project, so roll numbers of students in the group separated by a comma.
CS614: This will be at the end of every file name i.e. the course code.
Don't try to copy -paste or use someone else's work with your name, there are smart tools to catch
this, once you are caught, this can result into zero credit.
Why would companies entertain you?
·
You are students, and whom you meet were also once students.
·
You can do an assessment of the company for DWH potential at no cost.
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Since you are only interested in your project, so your analysis will be neutral.
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Your report can form a basis for a professional detailed assessment at a later stage.
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If a DWH already exists, you can do an independent audit.
If you present your case well you are likely to be entertained i.e. welcome by the organization.
The first and the foremost reason to get help is, whom you are talking to was once a student too
as you are currently, so there is a common bond. Since you have studied well DWH (hopefully),
therefore, you can do a requirement assessment (in the form of lifecycle study) of the company at
no cost; the company has nothing to lose. Your only interest is completion of your project and
grade, so you are going to be very objective and very neutra l; hence the company has still nothing
to lose. After you have done the lifecycle study, the same can be used as a seed or input by a
professional organization for an in depth study, thus saving in money to the company for which
you have done the work. Again the company has nothing to lose. It may so happen that the
company you contact already has a data warehouse in place, in such a case doing the lifecycle
development study can be used as a internal audit of the DWH implementation. Hence in short, if
the company allows and helps you with the study, it will be a win -win scenario for both the
parties.
Why you may be entertained?
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Figure-36.1: Adoption/Innovation curve
Fig-36.1 shows a typical adoption curve when a new item, product or service is introduced and
the ratio of people responding to it. As you can see the people who are the first ones to adopt or
embrace it are the innovators, and they are very few. This is followed by early adopters, which is
a sizeable figure, and this is the category of companies you are supposed to target as part of your
project. Note that in our country, Data Warehousing is not yet in the category of early majority,
so there will be more companies who are prime candidates for lifecycle study. You may also
come across people who may be genuinely interested in a DWH, but don't know enough about it,
and want to know. In such a case, be prepared to educate them or enlighten them. It would be best
if you look at a number of case studies or reports about their line of business before meeting
them.
Interestingly, the bell shaped curve (which is not a perfect bell) divides the prospects into two
equal parts i.e. 50% each. You should be looking at that 50% which can and will help you,
instead of those who are likely to help you, but at a later stage.
Finally this project has enough challenges to become your final year BSc project. In such a case
be prepared to do coding leading to system deployment and completion of all the remaining steps.
Remember, many large organizations/businesses may not need a data warehouse today, but they
will need one surely tomorrow. And when that happens, they will be looking for you to help them
achieve their objectives.
The project has more than enough potential to become a final year project, which will cover an
implementation and deployment also.
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Table of Contents:
  1. Need of Data Warehousing
  2. Why a DWH, Warehousing
  3. The Basic Concept of Data Warehousing
  4. Classical SDLC and DWH SDLC, CLDS, Online Transaction Processing
  5. Types of Data Warehouses: Financial, Telecommunication, Insurance, Human Resource
  6. Normalization: Anomalies, 1NF, 2NF, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
  7. De-Normalization: Balance between Normalization and De-Normalization
  8. DeNormalization Techniques: Splitting Tables, Horizontal splitting, Vertical Splitting, Pre-Joining Tables, Adding Redundant Columns, Derived Attributes
  9. Issues of De-Normalization: Storage, Performance, Maintenance, Ease-of-use
  10. Online Analytical Processing OLAP: DWH and OLAP, OLTP
  11. OLAP Implementations: MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP, DOLAP
  12. ROLAP: Relational Database, ROLAP cube, Issues
  13. Dimensional Modeling DM: ER modeling, The Paradox, ER vs. DM,
  14. Process of Dimensional Modeling: Four Step: Choose Business Process, Grain, Facts, Dimensions
  15. Issues of Dimensional Modeling: Additive vs Non-Additive facts, Classification of Aggregation Functions
  16. Extract Transform Load ETL: ETL Cycle, Processing, Data Extraction, Data Transformation
  17. Issues of ETL: Diversity in source systems and platforms
  18. Issues of ETL: legacy data, Web scrapping, data quality, ETL vs ELT
  19. ETL Detail: Data Cleansing: data scrubbing, Dirty Data, Lexical Errors, Irregularities, Integrity Constraint Violation, Duplication
  20. Data Duplication Elimination and BSN Method: Record linkage, Merge, purge, Entity reconciliation, List washing and data cleansing
  21. Introduction to Data Quality Management: Intrinsic, Realistic, Orr’s Laws of Data Quality, TQM
  22. DQM: Quantifying Data Quality: Free-of-error, Completeness, Consistency, Ratios
  23. Total DQM: TDQM in a DWH, Data Quality Management Process
  24. Need for Speed: Parallelism: Scalability, Terminology, Parallelization OLTP Vs DSS
  25. Need for Speed: Hardware Techniques: Data Parallelism Concept
  26. Conventional Indexing Techniques: Concept, Goals, Dense Index, Sparse Index
  27. Special Indexing Techniques: Inverted, Bit map, Cluster, Join indexes
  28. Join Techniques: Nested loop, Sort Merge, Hash based join
  29. Data mining (DM): Knowledge Discovery in Databases KDD
  30. Data Mining: CLASSIFICATION, ESTIMATION, PREDICTION, CLUSTERING,
  31. Data Structures, types of Data Mining, Min-Max Distance, One-way, K-Means Clustering
  32. DWH Lifecycle: Data-Driven, Goal-Driven, User-Driven Methodologies
  33. DWH Implementation: Goal Driven Approach
  34. DWH Implementation: Goal Driven Approach
  35. DWH Life Cycle: Pitfalls, Mistakes, Tips
  36. Course Project
  37. Contents of Project Reports
  38. Case Study: Agri-Data Warehouse
  39. Web Warehousing: Drawbacks of traditional web sear ches, web search, Web traffic record: Log files
  40. Web Warehousing: Issues, Time-contiguous Log Entries, Transient Cookies, SSL, session ID Ping-pong, Persistent Cookies
  41. Data Transfer Service (DTS)
  42. Lab Data Set: Multi -Campus University
  43. Extracting Data Using Wizard
  44. Data Profiling