Data Warehouses

Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is the main storage server hosting an organizations historical data, its corporate memory. It is distinct from operational or transactional systems supporting the business functions.

The function of the data warehouse is to consolidate and reconcile information from across several [or many] disparate business units and IT systems and provide a context for reporting and analytics. This includes:

• Corporate Performance
• Enterprise Decision Management
• Operational Performance Management
• Financial Performance
• Compliance
• Quality Management

A data warehouse can be normalized or denormalized. It can be a relational database, multidimensional database, flat file, hierarchical database, object database, etc.

Uses of Data Warehouse

The datawarehouse is used to contain the raw data for management's decision support systems [business intelligence tools].

Not all data warehouses are used for decision support. Many data warehouses are used for post-decision monitoring of the effects of decisions [for "operational" issues].

Main Benefit

The main benefit of a data warehouse is that complex queries and analysis, such as data mining, can be made on organisational information without slowing down the operational or transactional systems.

Advantages Of Data Warehouses

There are many advantages to using a data warehouse, including:

1. Enhances end-user access to a wide variety of data.
2. Decision support system users can obtain specified trend reports, e.g. the item with the most sales in a particular area/country within the last two years.
3. A data warehouse can be a significant enabler of commercial business applications, most notably customer relationship management (CRM).

Data Warehouse Concerns

There are some general concerns regarding the use of data warehouses:

1. Extracting, transforming and loading data consumes a lot of time and computational resources.
2. Data warehousing project scope must be actively managed to deliver a release of defined content and value.
3. Compatibility problems with systems already in place.
4. Security could develop into a serious issue, especially if the data warehouse is web accessible.
5. Data Storage design controversy warrants careful consideration and perhaps prototyping of the data warehouse solution for each project's environments.

NEXT: Defining Data Warehouses

Back To Top

Data Index | Data Governance | Data Quality | MDM | ODS | Data Warehouse