Accessing Organizational Information – Data Warehouse

History of Data Warehousing

•Data warehouses extend the transformation of data into information

•In the 1990’s executives became less concerned with the day-to-day business operations and more concerned with overall business functions

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

Data Warehouse Fundamentals

•Data warehouse – a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks

•The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes

•Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) – a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

•Data mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information