BI Project: Introduction of a
Data Warehouse for the
WL BANK

„In 2016 and 2017, WL BANK introduced a modern data warehouse solution based on Microsoft SQL Server, which provides the DZ BANK Group with valuable business insights. Fast Lane has supported us in this strategic project from the very beginning and initially advised us on the choice of system. Fast Lane has also assumed a leading role in the subsequent implementation of the new BI environment and the transfer of our data. We thank Fast Lane for the good and professional cooperation and look forward to joint follow-up projects!“

Ingo Meister, Project Manager DWH - WL BANK

WL BANK as a part of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken cooperative financial services group planned to introduce a modern agile data warehouse which should provide key figures to the DZ BANK AG, the central bank of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken, as well as to other banks in the group.

Fast Lane was commissioned in March 2016 with the consulting for the selection, planning and implementation of a new database management system and business intelligence (BI) tools. The choice was made for Microsoft SQL Server 2016, which was still available as Community Technology Preview (CTP) 3. x at the beginning of the project. Some of the new features were so promising for the planned project that an initial beta version through the data warehouse levels already seemed to make sense with the CTP.

The basis of the new business intelligence environment was the creation of efficient and stable processes for extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) corresponding data. The challenge was to individually produce reproducible processes for different target tables automatically and on the basis of metadata.

The new data warehouse was successfully commissioned at the beginning of 2017 and has since then provided DZ BANK with key figures on a regular basis and in an automated manner.

• Consulting in the selection of the database management system and bussiness intelligence tools
• Sizing up hardware requirements based on the existing environmen
• Installation and configuration of the development environment as first reference
• Creation of the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process
  • SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
  • BIDS Helper
  • Business Intelligence Markup Language (BIML) for automatically creating SSIS packages in the form of XML documents, enriched with C# for reading dynamic contents from database tables and injecting them into the packages
• Automated transfer of data sources in CPORT format and transfer to a staging database for further processing and transfer to the Data Warehouse Core
  • Automatic validation of source and target data
  • Automatic verification of schema changes
  • Automatic logging
  • Data profiling
• Transfer of the data into the data core by means of Data Vault modeling
  • Adding rows to the hub tables
  • Logical deletion
  • Generating entries in the link tables
  • Generation of entries in the satellite tables and historicization of old attribute values
    
• Consulting and support in the creation of the test and production environment
• Performance analysis and optimization
• Consulting in the implementation of security and audit strategies
  

WL BANK AG is a customer-oriented, highly competitive Pfandbriefbank in the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken cooperative financial services group. WL BANK is a subsidiary of the DZ BANK AG Deutsche Genossenschafts-Zentralbank, the cooperative central bank of the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken.