Building a data warehouse in SQL Server: Eight tips to get started

When building a data warehouse using SQL Server technologies, there are some challenges you might face. I'll offer you some suggestions for overcoming them. Naturally, each environment is likely to add its own twist to the challenges of building a data warehouse, but most of these issues are generic enough to apply to many companies embarking on architecting business intelligence (BI) applications.
Management support. This is the first and foremost challenge you must overcome. It is annoying to technical people (including yours truly) because it has to do with politics and not software. Let's keep in mind who signs your paycheck, however. If management isn't convinced they need a data warehouse all your technical skills will be in vain. Unfortunately upper management often thinks of a data warehouse as yet another system they have to invest in without any immediate return. Your job is to convince the powers that be they're not paying for bells and whistles – data warehouse will help them make better, more informed decisions by correlating data scattered across the enterprise. It is not uncommon to totally change the way an organization operates after a data warehouse application is implemented. Sometimes it helps to build a proof-of-a-concept (POC) project to demonstrate the power of BI. POC data warehouse will only contain a small portion of all data