By: Valentine George
Introduction: Data warehousing is a systematic form of storage. It allows for useful tools such as data mining, which increase efficiency. A data warehouse is sometimes called a major role player in a decision support system. It helps organizations to make an effective and good decision by looking at facts and trends from previous years.
Entry: Data warehousing is an essential part of an organization. It is used by organizations to come up with facts, trends or relationships that can help them make effective decisions or create effective strategies to accomplish their organizational goals.
There are many types of data warehousing. Online Transaction Processing is one of the data warehousing models. It is built for speed and easy to use. Another model is Online Analytical Processing, this model is difficult to use and it adds an extra step of analysis within the data. This model is slower than the online transaction processing model, as it requires more steps and more data to analyse certain queries. A common model of data warehousing is in which a data warehouse is subject oriented, time variant, non volatile and integrated. Subject oriented means that data is linked together and is organized by relationships. Time variant means that any data that is changed in the data warehouse can be tracked. Non volatile means that the data is never deleted or erased. This is a great way to protect any data, as it can be useful in future. Because this data is retained, it can be used later on as analysis to make important decisions for the organization. Finally, the data is integrated, which means that a data warehouse uses data that is organizational wide instead of from just one department.
In this growing age of technology, there are many types of data warehousing. They are Offline Operational Data Warehouses, Offline Data Warehouse, Real Time Data Warehouses and Integrated Data Warehouses.
· Offline Operational Data Warehouse: This is the simplest type of data warehouse. All it does is copy and paste data from real time data networks into an offline system where it can be used.
· Offline Data Warehouse: This data warehouse is updated frequently, daily, weekly or monthly and that data is then stored in an integrated structure, where others can access it and perform reporting.
· Real Time Data Warehouse: This type of data warehouse is updated every moment, whenever there’s a new occurrence of a data. For example, a Real Time Data Warehouse incorporates data from a Point of Sales system and is updated with each sale that is made.
· Integrated Data Warehouse: This type of data warehouse is used by other data warehouses, allowing them to process to past reports, as well as look up current data.
Data warehousing is very important in the business world as it helps increase consistency with the data. It also helps making decisions by looking at previous reports and analysis.
