An Overview Of Data Warehousing - 1707 Words

An Overview of Data Warehousing Samuel Eda Wilmington University Abstract Data warehousing is a crucial element of decision supporting process, which now for a long time has become a focus of the database industry. Vast number of commercial products and various services has been available now, and all of the top notch database management system vendors now have offerings in this area. This paper provides an overview of history of data warehousing, the type of systems in data warehousing, focusing on data mart, online analytical processing (OLAP), and online transaction processing (OLTP). This paper also emphasizes on the data warehouse environment, information storage, design methodologies including bottom-up design and top-down†¦show more content†¦Data warehouses are targeted for decision supporting. Old, summarized and consolidated data is very much important than detailed as well as individual records. As data warehouses store consolidated data, possibly from several operational databases, for perhaps a very long time, they tend to be in order s of magnitude much greater than operational databases; enterprise data warehouses are projected to be hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems for example marketing, sales, etc. The data may be passing through an operational data store for additional operations before it is used in the DW for reporting. History The concept of data warehousing goes back to the late 80s when IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy developed business data warehouse. To summarize, the concept of data warehousing was created to provide an architectural model for the flow of collection of data from various operational systems to the decision supporting environments. The concept attempted to solve the various technicalities associated with this flow of data, primarily the high costs associated with it. In the absence of a data warehousing, an enormous amount of redundancy was needed to support multiple decision support environments. In larger organizations it was usual for multiple decision support environments to operate on their own. Even