Accessing Chapter Eight

Hello everyone! Our next chapter is chapter eight, Accessing Organizational Information (Data Warehouse). This topic talks about data warehouse and data marts in organization, the multidimensional nature of data warehouses (and data marts) with the two-dimensional nature of databases, the cleanliness of information throughout an organization and the relationship between business intelligence and a data warehouse. Hope you guys enjoy this topic!

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 is 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.

Meanwhile, Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) is 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 on the other hand, contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Model of Data Warehouse

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 is a particular attribute of information. However a cube is a common term for the representation of multidimensional information.

Data mining is 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 is a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information. Below is contact information in an operational system, standardizing Customer name from Operational Systems, information cleansing activities and accurate and complete information:

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the information that people use to support their decision-making efforts. Principle BI enablers include technology, people and culture.