Data WareHousing

Data warehousing is a term that has been coined in recent years to design computer systems aimed to manage data for analysis and to assist management in making decisions. Similar “buzzwords” are Decision Support Systems, Business Intelligence, Data Marts and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing).

A Data Warehouse should therefore be a place where people can access , find , understand and analyse their data.

Too often data-ware-houses have become data-jail-houses or data-where-houses where nobody is able to access, find or understand  the information he needs to run his business.

Successful Data Warehouses must be properly designed. Dimensional modelling concepts should be applied, that make it easy to pass from a relational view of the data to a multidimensional one.

Great attention must be paid to the ETL (Extraction – Transform – Load) phase, which takes the data from the operational systems and put them into the DW. Data quality checks should “certify” all the data coming into the DW.

Results of analysis can be published and made accessible on the Web, through to enterprise reporting frameworks.