Data warehousing

What is Data warehouse?

A data warehouse which is also referred to as enterprise data warehouse or EDW, is a system used for the analysis and reporting of information or data.

Here the storage of both current and historical data takes place and they are in turn used for making analytical reports for knowledge workers throughout the enterprise.

Reports could vary from comparisons in annual terms or quarterly terms and it also deals with daily sales analyses in details.

The data which remains stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems which may be marketing, sales and others. DWs are central repositories of integrated data which come from one or more disparate sources.

The data may draw through data storage which is operational for more operations before it is applied for reporting in the data warehouse.

Data warehousing deals with storage of data and use of concept, logic and physical models to support business goals and information needs for the users.

A data warehouse is the basis for a successful BI program. Creating a Data Warehouse is not a piece of cake as it requires mapping of data between sources and fair games which is then followed by capturing the details of the transformation in a metadata repository.

The data warehouse provides the users with a single, comprehensive source of both current data as well as historical data.

The benefits of data warehousing are:

1. It helps in congregating data from multiple sources into a single database so that the application

of a single query engine can be done to represent information.

2. It helps in the mitigation of the problem of database isolation level lock contention in transaction processing systems which occurs as a result of attempts to run large, long hunting down, analysis queries in transaction processing databases.

3. Maintains the data history, even if the source transaction systems do not.

4. It helps in Incorporating information from multiple source systems which enables a central view across the enterprise. This welfare is always valuable, but especially so when the governance has grown by merger.

5. It helps in the improvement of data quality, by providing consistent codes and descriptions, flagging or even setting up bad information.

6. It helps in presenting the organization's information consistently.

7.  It offers a single common data model for all data of interest irrespective of the information origin.

8. It helps in restructuring the data so that it delivers best query performance, even for complex analytic queries, without touching on the operational schemes.

9. Add the value of operational business applications, notably customer relationship management systems.

10. It helps in reaching a decision–support queries easier to compose.

Warehoused data must be kept safe and so it is stored making it more reliable, easy to retrieve and easy to handle. The concept of data warehousing was initiated in in 1988 by Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy.

As computer systems became more complex and it started handling greater amounts of information the need for data warehousing grew.

KEY BENEFITS OF DATA MANAGEMENT WITH HEXAGON

• Optimized management of business information and access to metadata management, retrieval of information, migration and operation masking
• Efficiency in Warehousing of enterprise data with open bus architecture better results
• Deployment of smarter and cost-efficient technologies with minimum disturbance
• Improved data quality and reduced risks
• Application re-engineering
• Reduced costs and optimal resource use
• Metadata management and accounting
• Enterprise-wide scalability