Thursday, 25 September 2014

Data warehousing basics

What is Data Warehouse:
Data warehouse is a relational database which is used to store as well as analyze the historical data of an organization(s). It usually contains the historical data derived from transactional data of single source system or different source systems. The main purpose of the data warehouse is to serve the reporting needs of higher management.

We can say simply in other words, Data warehouse is a database which contains the integrated data of the different source systems.

Characteristics of a data warehouse: 

1) Subject Oriented: A data warehouse can be used to analyze the particular subject area like HR,Sales,Marketing.

2) Integrated: As we discussed data warehouse is collection of data from different data source, so it should avoid the conflicts like different data types,different type of metrics like that.
Suppose data is collecting from different countries, in this case each country have its own currency standards like rupee,dolor,euro etc.. but when data warehouse storing this data it should store in unique format.

3) Nonvolatile:  As name indicates, once data entered into data warehouse it should not be changed. Because we are using data warehouse for historical data analysis.

4) Time Variant: A data warehouse's focus on change over time is what is meant by the term time variant. Historical data is kept in a data warehouse. For example, one can retrieve data from 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even older data from a data warehouse. This contrasts with a transactions system, where often only the most recent data is kept. For example, a transaction system may hold the most recent address of a customer, where a data warehouse can hold all addresses associated with a customer.

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