There are many advantages to using a data warehouse, some of them enhance end-user access to a wide variety of data and business decision makers can obtain various kinds of trend reports. A data warehouse can help improve commercial business applications, most notably Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
The acquisition process for data analysis include activities like consolidating data from several sources, filtering out unwanted data, correcting incorrect data, converting data to new data elements, and aggregating data into new data subsets. This data is then stored in the enterprise data warehouse, from where it can moved into data marts or to an analytical data store that holds data in a more useful form for certain types of analysis. Metadata (data that defines the data in the data warehouse) is stored in a metadata repository and cataloged by a metadata directory. Finally, a variety of analytical software tools can be provided to query, report, mine and analyze the data for delivery via Internet and intranet Web systems to business end …show more content…
The data marts may be designed for specific departments, and they may have summary data which is in the form of a dimensional structure.
f. General Principles in Handling Data Warehouses
Once a company has successfully implemented their data warehouse, it is important for them to establish rules and regulations with which to use it. While different companies will have different rules when it comes to handling their data warehouses, there are some general principles in handling data warehouses properly.
The very first rule of thumb is to realize that data warehouses are challenging to use. It is important for companies to analyze their data carefully before making decisions that are based on it. It is unwise to just accept data as it is, without carefully looking for errors or other problems.
The second rule of data warehouses is to understand the data that is stored. It has been said that knowledge is power, but this is only a half truth if knowledge that is stored and unused. Companies will want to perform an analysis each day of the databases that are connected to the data warehouse by analyzing the relationships among numerous