Legacy BI Design - On Premises Enterprise BI Architecture & Design from a bird's-eye view.

Objective

It's always good to know the history of everything, including the history of BI, how it started, how it changed and transformed in to what it is today. Did you know that the word BI was born around the year 2005? Prior to that, it was know as Management Information System (MIS).

See the overall objective and complete agenda here: Overall Objective and Agenda

In the Late 90's....

Back in the 90's, a copy of the day to day Transaction DB was taken. It was known as the "Sync DB" or "Reporting DB", all the reports were pointing to this database. There were many ways to achieve this, including SQL Replication, SQL Mirroring, Log Shipping and etc... The report was basically SSRS and Crystal Report.

Why was it designed like this? The Transaction DB was getting big and the number of transactions was growing. The reports were locking/blocking the transactions and making the system slow.

Circa the year 2000

The Sync DB was renamed to Golden DB and some basic logic was added. The Golden DB definition was never clear.

2005-2015ish

This was the start of the cube era; the Golden DB was designed as if it were a Transactional DB and not a BI DB.