CHAPTER 8

WHAT IS DATA WAREHOUSE?

The data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to-day operations because : 

• Operational operation is mainly current - does not include the history for better decision making
• Issue of quality information
• Without information history, it is difficult to tell how and why things change overtime

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNDAMENTALS

Data warehouse - A logical collection of information - gathered from many different operational databases - that supports business analytics activities and decision - making tasks

The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to combined information throughout an   

organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes – data warehouse      

support only analytical processing

Extraction, transformation and loading ( ETL) - Is a process that extracts information from

internal and external databases, transform the information using a common set of enterprise 

definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

Data Warehouse - Then send subsets of information to data mart

Data Mart - Contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Data Warehouse Model

Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

Cube - Is the common term for the representation of multidimensional information

Once a cube of information is created, users can begin to slice and dice the cube to drill down

into the information. Users can analyze information in a number of different ways and with 

number of different dimensions

Data Mining - The process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw

 data alone

To perform data mining, users need data - mining tools

Data Mining Tools - Use a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationship in large 

volumes of information and infer rules from them that predict future behaviour and guide 

decision making 

Information Cleansing or Scrubbing

A process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete 

information. Occur during ETL process and second on the information once if is in the 

data warehouse

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

  

Refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information to support decision -making efforts. These systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and  inventory and distribution analysis to name a few

Eg: Excel, Access