A properly designed and configured database can provide ready access to the enterprise-wide data to answer the ad hoc, tactical, decision support, data mining, and analytic requests that a modern business enterprise generates in its quest to remain ahead of its competition.
This section discusses aspects of the Vantage architecture that need to be understood for database design and provides general design considerations. This section also introduces the concepts of database modeling, both logical and physical, as a preview for the remaining sections in this document.