Data Warehousing Made Simple
What is Data Warehouse.
A data warehouse is a type of electronic data management system that is designed to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics, by a business or other organization. Data warehouses are solely intended to create a trove of historical data that can be retrieved and analyzed to provide useful insight into the organization's operations.
Data warehousing is a vital component of business intelligence. That wider term encompasses the information infrastructure that modern businesses use to track their past successes and failures and inform their decisions for the future.
-Data warehousing is the storage of information over time by a business or other organization.
-New data is periodically added by people in various key departments such as marketing and sales.
-The warehouse becomes a library of historical data that can be retrieved and analyzed in order to inform decision-making in the business.
-The key factors in building an effective data warehouse include defining the information that is critical to the organization and identifying the sources of the information.
-A database is designed to supply real-time information. A data warehouse is designed as an archive of historical information
How Data Warehouse Works.
-The need to warehouse data evolved as businesses began relying on computer systems to create, file, and retrieve important business documents. The concept of data warehousing was introduced in 1988 by IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy.-Data warehousing is designed to enable the analysis of historical data. Comparing data consolidated from multiple heterogeneous sources can provide insight into the performance of a company. A data warehouse is designed to allow its users to run queries and analyses on historical data derived from transactional sources.
-Data added to the warehouse do not change and cannot be altered. The warehouse is the source that is used to run analytics on past events, with a focus on changes over time. Warehoused data must be stored in a manner that is secure, reliable, easy to retrieve, and easy to manage. -Maintaining the Data Warehouse.
-There are certain steps that are taken to maintain a data warehouse. One step is data extraction, which involves gathering large amounts of data from multiple source points. After a set of data has been compiled, it goes through data cleaning, the process of combing through it for errors and correcting or excluding any that are found.
-The cleaned-up data are then converted from a database format to a warehouse format. Once stored in the warehouse, the data goes through sorting, consolidating, and summarizing, so that it will be easier to use. Over time, more data are added to the warehouse as the various data sources are updated.
-A key book on data warehousing is W. H. Inmon's "Building the Data Warehouse," a practical guide that was first published in 1990 and has been reprinted several times.
-Today, businesses can invest in cloud-based data warehouse software services from companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle, among others.
Data warehouse system (DWH) is also known with other names as:
-Decision Support System (DSS)
-Executive Information System (EIS)
-Management Information System (MIS)
-Business Intelligence Solution (BIS)
