Frame Work

The business analyst get the information from the data

warehouses to measure the performance and make
critical adjustments in order to win over other business
holders in the market. Having a data warehouse offers
the following advantages:
Since a data warehouse can gather information quickly
and efficiently, it can enhance business productivity.
A data warehouse provides us a consistentviewof
customers and items, hence, it helps us manage
customer relationship.
A data warehouse also helps in bringing down the
costs by tracking trends, patterns over a long period in
a consistent and reliable manner.

 To design an effective and efficient data

warehouse, we need to understand and
analyze the business needs and
construct abusiness analysis
framework. Each person has different
views regarding the design of a data
warehouse. These views are as follows:

Three-Tier Data Warehouse

Architecture
Generally a data warehouses adopts
a three-tier architecture. Following
are the three tiers of the data
warehouse architecture.

 Bottom Tier- The bottom tier of the

architecture is the data warehouse
database server. It is therelational
database system. We use the back end
tools and utilities to feed data into the
bottom tier. These back end tools and
utilities perform the Extract, Clean,
Load, and refresh functions.

 Middle Tier- In the middle tier, we have the OLAP

Server that can be implemented in either of the
following ways.
By Relational OLAP (ROLAP), which is an extended
relational databasemanagementsystem. The ROLAP
maps the operations on multidimensional data to standard
relational operations.
By Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) model, which directly
implements the multidimensional data and operations.

Top-Tier- This tier is the front-end client layer. This

layer holds the query tools and reporting tools, analysis
tools and data mining tools.

 OLAP applications share a set of user and

functional requirements that cannot be met
by query or personal-productivity tools that
work directly against the historical data
maintained in the warehouse relational
database. An OLAP server provides
functionality and performance that
leverages the data warehouse for reporting,
analysis, modeling and planning
requirements. These processes mandate
that the organization looks not only at past
performance, but more importantly, at the
future performance of the business.

OLAP Server
Architectures.
Relational OLAP (ROLAP) servers: These are
the intermediate servers that stand in between a
relational back-end server and client front-end
tools. They use a relational or extended-relational
DBMS to store and manage warehouse data, and
OLAP middleware to support missing pieces.
ROLAP servers include optimization for each
DBMS back-end, implementation of aggregation
navigation logic, and additional tools and
services. ROLAP technology tends to have greater
scalability than MOLAP technology.

 Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) servers:

These servers support multidimensional views
of data through array-based multidimensional
storage engines. They map multidimensional
views
directly
to
data
cube
array
structures.Many OLAP servers adopt a twolevel storage representation to handle sparse
and dense data sets: the dense subcubes are
identified and stored as array structures, while
the sparse subcubes employ compression
technology for efficient storage utilization.

 Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) servers: The

hybrid OLAP approach combines ROLAP
and MOLAP technology, benefitting from
the greater scalability of ROLAP and the
faster computation of MOLAP. For
example, a HOLAP server may allow large
volumes of detail data to be stored in a
relational database, while aggregations
are kept in a separate MOLAP store.

 Specialized SQL servers: To meet the

growing demand of OLAP processing in
relational databases, some relational
and data warehousing forms (e.g.,
Redbrick) implement specialized SQL
servers which provide advanced query
language and query processing support
for SQL queries over star and snowflake
schemas in a read-only environment.