SSAS - AdventureWorksDW sample data warehouse for data mining and OLAP

The Adventure Works DW sample data warehouse is used to demonstrate the business intelligence features that are available in SQL Server. The data in the data warehouse has been trended to support both data mining and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) scenarios.

The follow is from Microsoft site AdventureWorks Sample Data Warehouse: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms124623.aspx 

The following sections provide more information about the data warehouse itself and about the scenarios that it supports:

• The Data Warehouse
• Data Mining Scenarios
• OLAP Scenarios

The Data Warehouse

Adventure Works DW contains a subset of the tables from the OLTP database, in addition to financial information that is pulled from a separate data source. The data is kept in synch with the OLTP database to support typical Integration Services scenarios such as loading and updating the data warehouse. The Readme_AWDataWarehouseRefresh Package Sample demonstrates how to use an Integration Services package to load data into Adventure Works DW from the Adventure Works OLTP.

Adventure Works DW contains two subject areas, finance and sales, which are described in the following sections. Additionally, the data warehouse contains views that are used to support the data mining scenarios that are described later in this topic.