Professional Documents
Culture Documents
key to survival in the 1990s and beyond is being able to analyze, plan, and
react to changing business conditions in a much more rapid fashion.
top managers, analysts, and knowledge workers in our enterprises, need
more and better information.
Every day, organizations large and small, create billions of bytes of data about
all aspects of their business; millions of individual facts about their customers,
products, operations and people.
But for the most part, this is locked up in a maze of computer systems and is
exceedingly difficult to get at.
This phenomenon has been described as data in jail.
Which customers
are most likely to go
to the competition ?
What impact will
new products/services
have on revenue
and margins?
Continued
Having a data warehouse we can get following benefits:
Improved user access: data is meant for analysis, benchmarking, prediction etc.
Better consistency of data: information contained in the data warehouse is standardized
All-in-one: give a business the "big picture" view that is needed to analyze the business,
make plans, track competitors and more
Advanced query processing: data warehouse will process queries much faster and more
effectively, leading to efficiency and increased productivity
Retention of data history: providing a reliable history of all changes, additions and
deletions. With a data warehouse, the integrity of data is ensured
Informational systems:
Data Warehouse
According to Inmons (father of data warehousing) definition:
An enterprise structured repository of subject-oriented, time-variant, historical data used for
information retrieval and decision support. The data warehouse stores atomic and summary
data.
OR
A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection
of data in support of management's decision making process.
Ralph Kimball provided a more concise definition of a data warehouse:
A data warehouse is a copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis.
This is a functional view of a data warehouse.
Kimball did not address how the data warehouse is built like Inmon did; rather he focused on
the functionality of a data warehouse.
Integrated
Data
Warehouse
Non Volatile
Time Variant
Subject-Oriented
Subject-Oriented: A data warehouse can be used to analyze a particular
subject area. For example, "sales" can be a particular subject.
Data is categorized and stored by business subject rather than by application
OLTP Applications
Equity
Plans
Shares
Insurance
Savings
Loans
Customer
financial
information
Integrated
Integrated: A data warehouse integrates data from multiple data sources. For
example, source A and source B may have different ways of identifying a product,
but in a data warehouse, there will be only a single way of identifying a product.
Data on a given subject is defined and stored once.
Continued
Savings
Current
accounts
Loans
OLTP Applications
Customer
Data Warehouse
Time-Variant
Time-Variant: Historical data is kept in a data warehouse. For example, one can
retrieve data from 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even older data from a data
warehouse. This contrasts with a transactions system, where often only the most
recent data is kept. For example, a transaction system may hold the most recent
address of a customer, where a data warehouse can hold all addresses associated
with a customer.
Data is stored as a series of snapshots, each representing a period of time
Time
Jan-97
Feb-97
Mar-97
Data
January
February
March
Non-volatile
Non-volatile: Once data is in the data warehouse, it will not change. So, historical data in a
data warehouse should never be altered.
OR data in the data warehouse is not updated or deleted.
Operational
Warehouse
Load
Insert
Update
Delete
Read
Read
DWA
Types of end-users:
Executives and managers
Power users (BA, Financial analysts, engineers)
Support Users (clerical, admins)
Evolving DWA:
Evolve data warehouse considering the framework
Goals
Provide Easy Access to Corporate Data
user access tools must be easy to use