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Blackbaud Data Warehouse (BBDW) As A System Requirement

Matt Crawford

In the Q1 2017 Roadmap call, we mentioned a modification to the Blackbaud CRM System Requirements. Specifically, Blackbaud Data Warehouse (BBDW) was added as a deployment requirement. Blackbaud previously made mention of this in October 2016 at BBCON and in prior client communications.

This requirement means Blackbaud clients still have a choice when it comes to deploying the BBDW; however, as Blackbaud continues to build out new functionality that is read-intensive and does not require real-time data, that particular functionality will be built to use the BBDW. The motivation behind this requirement is to drive clients’ continued success with Blackbaud CRM. Part of that success will involve Blackbaud making strategic performance decisions that, in some cases, will require the existence of the BBDW. Existing examples of this are the Giving List and rolling date filters in Query. An upcoming example of this might be SKY Reporting (TBD).

Blackbaud fully understands that in most cases it is not completely effortless for our self-hosted clients to deploy the BBDW; however, we are diligently working to lessen that burden. An existing example of this is the implementation of database snapshots to use during the ETL, which was released in 4.0 SP11. An upcoming example of this is the ability to run pre-defined sets of SSIS packages (work underway). The end goal is to enable faster, more reliable, and more frequent BBDW refreshes. Blackbaud understands that since it is deployed through a separate installer, we cannot, nor would we want to force clients to actually deploy the BBDW. However, we want to share our plans for future development early enough that you feel informed of the direction we are going.

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Comments

Jason Metcalfe

Thanks Matt. Does Blackbaud have any guidelines about what new functionality in the Blackbaud Enterprise CRM application will be considered to use data sources based from the Blackbaud Data Warehouse? Also, will Blackbaud call out when the Data Warehouse will be the data-source in Service Pack user-guides or other materials? This becomes an important consideration for customers who have their own custom data marts or warehouse or were not planning on deploying the Blackbaud Data Warehouse.

Matt Crawford

Thanks for your comments and questions, Jason.

We are following a set of guidelines that are clear today, yet flexible toward future development. Given that a nightly ETL refresh is both recommended and prevalent today, we are approaching any new development by first considering if day-old data is acceptable for the use case that it will solve. Examples might include reporting and marketing segmentation, but the answer of whether or not latent data is OK will largely rely on Discovery with our clients to validate whether a particular feature is a good candidate to use latent data. A related goal of ours is to enable more frequent and consistent ETL refreshes. We have started in that direction with the release of our ETL Snapshot capability in 4.0 SP11, and as our monitoring of hosted clients has improved, we are in turn improving the ETL process. That is why staying flexible toward future development is important to us. If the future involves refreshes every 12, or even 6 hours, then targeting even more read-intensive transactions against the BBDW makes sense from a performance perspective. We're not there yet, but that is a goal of ours, and we are working toward it now.

To answer your question about documentation, we will continue to call out when features require the BBDW in the New Features guide, and will follow the documentation approach used with the release of the Giving List in 4.0: https://www.blackbaud.com/files/support/guides/enterprise/400/bbcrm40.pdf#page=87

As we deliver more features that use BBDW data, I also envision us taking a documentation approach similar to what we had previously done with Audit tables, and documenting a list of what Blackbaud CRM features rely on that data: https://www.blackbaud.com/files/support/guides/enterprise/400/security.pdf#page=74

As always, we are interested in learning your ideas on how to best present this information.