The Rails implementation of ActiveRecord has proven to be one of the most successful and appreciated components of the Rails framework. Developers appreciate the simplicity of their models, the built-in unit testing support, and the rich associations that can be defined in ActiveRecord.

ActiveRecord, though, is designed primarily for operational systems. It handles CRUD in an elegant fashion. This is a good thing, but there are more opportunities beyond operational systems. Our current project requires the creation of a fairly large data warehouse and proved to be a good starting point for extracting data warehouse functionality from our implementation into an open source generic data warehouse plugin that we are calling ActiveWarehouse.

This presentation will provide an introduction to data warehousing, Rails style. It will cover the basic elements of the ActiveWarehouse plugin and will include a live demonstration of creating a Rails-based data warehouse. It will provide an introduction to the concepts of data warehouses and will show how the ActiveWarehouse plugin can be used to reduce the time required to build a data warehouse front end.