Unfortunately many of the decisions made in the construction of a Data Warehouse are made in ignorance of the performance characteristics of the Data Warehouse hardware and software environments. This has resulted in massive differences in expectations between system users and system designers and administrators. It is essential that system/database administrators work closely with the Data Warehouse designers to understand and best characterize the database performance requirements.This will enable the system/database administrators to make a better best guess for the system configuration that will yield good performance.