Chapter 8 : Accessing organization information - Data warehouse

CHAPTER 8

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

Multidimensional Analysis And Data Mining

•Databases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables

•In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains

  layers of columns and rows

       –Dimension – a particular attribute of information

•Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information

•Data mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered

                              by the raw data alone

•To perform data mining users need data-mining tools

            –Data-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to find patterns 

                                                 and relationships in large volumes of information and                                             infers rules that predict future behavior and guide                                                      decision making

  Information Cleansing Or Scrubbing

•An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse

•

•Information cleansing or scrubbing – a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information

•Contact information in an operational system

•Standardizing Customer name from Operational Systems

•Information cleansing activities

•Accurate and complete information

Business Intelligence 

•Business intelligence – information that people use to support their decision-making efforts

•

•Principle BI enablers include:

–Technology

–People

–Culture