Data warehousing

Data warehousing

Contents

1. Introduction

2. What is a data warehouse

3. Past, Present and Future

4. Data Warehouses and Business Organisations

5. Conclusion

6. Bibliography


1.0 Introduction

In recent years, data warehousing has emerged as the primary method of analysing sales and marketing data for a competitive advantage. As the number of knowledge workers using the data warehouse/data mart grows and the amount of data increases daily, performance problems have become a major concern of both the Information Systems staff and the users.

Many options have been tried in an attempt to solve the performance problems - from bigger hardware to different software or database tuning and redesign using star schemas or snowflake data structures. However, all have limitations - either in functionality or in terms of cost - and their strengths are almost inevitably outstripped by users' demands.

During the past three years, data warehousing has emerged as one of the hottest trends in information technology for corporations seeking to utilise the massive amounts of data they are accumulating.
Managers from all business disciplines want enterprise wide information access, as well as the ability to manipulate and analyse information that the company has gathered for a single purpose, to make more intelligent business decisions. Whether to increase customer value, identify new markets or improve the management of the firm's assets, the data warehouse promises to deliver the information necessary to accomplish these tasks quickly and efficiently.

This report entails various aspects of Data Warehousing, ranging from a clear and concise definition of its working system through to its operational environment. It discusses its implications and effects on internal and external interaction. I have presented my finding with the backing of some actual case studies and elaborated upon the evolution, the current state and what the future holds for Data Warehousing.
The report is summarised by a final conclusion.


2.0 �What is a Data Warehouse�

Data warehouse is the center of the architecture for information systems in the 1990s. Data warehouse supports informational processing by providing a solid platform of integrated, historical data from which to do analysis. Data warehouse provides the facility for integration in a world of unintegrated application systems. Data warehouse is achieved in a step-at-a-time fashion. Data warehouse organises and stores the data needed for informational, analytical processing over a long historical time perspective.
There is indeed a tremendous advantage in building and maintaining a data warehouse.

So now the question arises, what is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is a

� subject-orientated
� integrated
� time-variant
� non-volatile

collection of data in support of management�s decision making process.

The data entering the data warehouse comes from the operational environment in almost every case.
The data warehouse is always a physically separate store of data transformed from the data found in the operational environment.

To understand the data warehouse in more detail, I...

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