In the world of Agile Application development and particularly cloud development of these applications as Software as a Service offerings, Continious Integration is a core component used to speed up and automate the development and deployment of these solutions.
When applied to the world of data warehouse and business intelligence Continous Integration has a number of additional challenges.
== Destructive rebuilds
In app dev you can often do a destructive rebuild of the environment when required. This means blowing away the entire environment, application code, data and screens and rebuilding them from scratch. This is possible given the low volume of data that is held in these systems.
In data warehousing the data is often large and this technique is difficult.
{{a number of new technologies are emerging that make this processes easier and viable. They work on the basis of retain all data in the time variant layer and then creating the value add data structures as virtualised instances of this data, similar to the concept of views. In the past this approach wouldn’t perform without a massive amount of engineering, but with the elastic capabilities of cloud infrastructure, and new virtualisation technologies this is becoming a viable approach.}}
== Integration with COTS
[[hard to get cots to integrate to CI]]
[[cant blow away report content and recreate in the tool]]
[[cant retain opersinalisation, ie bookmarks, user metadata and content metadata needs to be seperate]]