User Access To Data

The query manager is the software interface between the users and the data. It presents the data to the users in a form they understand. The query manager also controls the user access to the data. In a data warehouse, the raw data will often be an amalgamation of data from many disparate data sources. The disparate and often contradictory data needs to be tied together somehow; to achieve this the raw data is often abstracted. Data in this raw format can often be difficult to interpret. This, coupled with the fact that data from a single logical table is often partitioned into multiple real tables, can make ad hoc querying of raw data difficult.

The tool also needs to be capable of presenting the coherent picture of the data warehouse that the query manager would have presented. If users have access via tools that do not interface directly through the query manager, you should try setting up some form of indirect control by the query manager. Certainly no large ad hoc queries should be allowed to be run by anyone other than the query manager. It may be possible to get the tool to dump the query request to a flat file, where the query manager can pick it up. If queries do bypass the query manager, your query statistics gathering will be less accurate.