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Essay on Data Warehousing
A data warehouse is a decision support system; a structured environment designed to store and analyze all or significant parts of a set of data. The data are logically and physically transformed from multiple source applications into business structure and are updated and maintained over a long time period. The data warehouse is organized around the major subjects in an enterprise such as customer, vendor, product, and activity. The alignment around subject areas affects the design and implementation of data in the data warehouse. Data that will not be used for decision support system processing is excluded from the data warehouse.
The main components of a data warehouse include a database; data loading and extracting tools; administration and management platforms; and application tools such as data mining, query, and reporting, visualization and display, and so on (Berson & Smith, 1997).
The major functions of these components are as follows (Zagelow, 1997):
- Access, transform, clean and summarize data into data warehouse database.
- Store and manage data.
- Manage metadata.
- Display and analyze data, discover useful patterns, and produce reports.
To develop such a data warehouse, three steps—mapping from source documentation to enterprise model to tabular model to dimensional model—are taken. Source documentation captures the physical data structure of an operational system. The enterprise model describes all important data in the enterprise at a high level. The outcomes are usually consistent naming conventions and a list of attribute names and definitions, which are useful in mapping source data to the warehouse. The tabular model supports queries and reports for a specific business function such as finance or customer support. The dimensional model supports numerical analysis and represents data as an array. The values in the array are numeric facts that measure business performance, and the dimensions of the array are parameters of the fact, such as date of sale, region, and product....
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