What is a Data Warehouse ?
Before we start our journey into the amazing world of Data, we need to understand why exactly is data becoming so crucial in today’s world and how it drives the decision-making processes of any enterprise, and how a crisis gave rise to the paradigm of Data warehouse.
As the winds of globalization started flowing, businesses became more complex, corporations spread globally, and competitions become fierce and cutthroat. To survive in this race, organizations needed information. Not just any information but information that will be readily available to make strategic decisions.
In those times or even as of today most of the information is generated by operational systems, Operational systems are still a vital part of any organization and can be anything from a billing desk to any legacy system having age-old customer data. But this data can only provide snapshots of transactions for a specific time. To make strategic decisions, executives and managers needed information like, which product lines need to be expanded, which geographic region to focus on, what markets to strengthen. Not only this, executives needed to focus on customer’s needs and preferences, emerging trends, quality satisfaction levels of products.
The problem was not that organizations were having no data as any organization may it be a conglomerate company or even a medium-sized organization, they had years of customer data, but all data was operational, and event driven to make decisions while they needed customer-centric data. Many organizations tried to make their strategic information systems like Ad-hoc reporting systems, executive information systems but many failed because these organizations didn’t have the technology nor the resources to turn operational data into effective information. So, we can say that organizations needed a database for the analytical tasks, which can take data from multiple applications integrate them in a timely manner, and at the same provide data integrity and credibility.
This critical information crisis gave rise to the paradigm of data warehousing. The data warehouse is not a single software or hardware product you purchase to provide strategic information, but it is rather a computing environment where users can find strategic information, an environment where users are put directly in touch with data they need to make better decisions. Data-warehouse exists to answer questions users have about business, the performance of the various operations, the business trends, and what can be done to improve the business. Data warehouses provided direct access to data, providing a single unified version of the key performance indicators, recording the past accurately, and providing the ability for viewing the data from many different perspectives.
In simple layman’s terms Data-warehouse in the blend of technologies which takes data from different operational systems; integrates, clean and transform that data to provide useful strategic information which is very useful for continued health and survival of the corporation.
I would conclude this by stating Inmons’s definition of data warehouse,
A data warehouse is subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.
I hope that by now you would be excited to get to know about data warehousing. We will be discussing more it in the upcoming blogs.
In simple layman’s terms Datawarehouse in the blend of technologies which takes data from different operational systems; integrates, clean and transform that data to provide useful strategic information which is very useful for continued health and survival of the corporation.
I would conclude this by stating Inmons’s definition of data warehouse,
A data warehouse is subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.
I hope that by now you would be excited to get to know about data warehousing. We will be discussing more it in the upcoming blogs.
