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Data Warehouse Concepts – Data Warehouse

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 Data Warehouse Concepts – Data Warehouse

1 - DATA WAREHOUSE
Consider a bank that has different OLTP applications for handling accounts and
deposits, Loans and Credit cards. Let us assume that the OLTP applications for
handling accounts and deposits uses mainframes and it stores the data in IBM
DB2 database. The OLTP application for Loans is using Oracle database for data
storage. Credit card application uses a totaly different database to store its data.
The information about the bank employees are stored in different files. If the bank
decides to do a market analysis, it will require data from all these systems. To do
analysis, the BI application requires data from different applications to be stored
in a single location i.e. the data warehouse.

Data Warehouse can be defined as a Subject-Oriented, Integrated, Time-

Variant, Non-volatile collection of data, enabling management decision
making. A data warehouse is specifically structured for dynamic queries
(Queries that are not pre-processed and are prepared and executed at run time),
and fast and efficient business analytics. The data warehouse will act as the
source of data for reports and analytics.

1.1.1 Features of data warehouse

 Subject-oriented

A data warehouse (DW or DWH) can be used to analyse different subject areas.
For example, in a retail enterprise, ‘Sales’ can be a particular subject; ‘Order
processing’ could be another subject, etc.

An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) typically stores data from all or most of
the subject areas of an enterprise, thereby enabling cross-functional analysis and
enterprise reporting. Data marts (discussed later in this document) help analyse a
particular subject area.

 Integrated
Data from multiple source systems can be loaded into Data Warehouse. Hence
DW is integrated in nature, which means a Data Warehouse contains data that is
arriving from multiple source systems.

For example, a company is located in multiple cities across the country. Business
is using different source systems to capture transaction data in each and every
city, and data from all these systems are integrated and stored in the Data
Warehouse.

 Time-variant

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 Data Warehouse Concepts – Data Warehouse

Historical data is kept in a data warehouse. For example, one can retrieve data
from 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even older data from a data warehouse.
This contrasts with a Transaction system, where only the most recent data is
often kept.

 Non-volatile
Data in the data warehouse is seldom over-written and never deleted. The data is
static, mostly read-only, and retained for future reporting.

1.1.2 Characteristics of a Data warehouse

 Stores large volumes of data used frequently by DSS (Decision Support

System)

 Is maintained separately from operational databases

 Are relatively static with infrequent updates

 Contains data integrated from several, possibly heterogeneous operational

databases

 Supports queries that process large data volumes

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