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What is a data warehouse? A Data Warehouse is a repository of integrated
information, available for queries and analysis. Data and information are extracted
from heterogeneous sources as they are generated. This makes it much easier and more
efficient to run queries over data that originally came from different sources.
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Making better business decisions quickly is the key to succeeding in today's
competitive marketplace. Understandably, organizations seeking to improve their
decision-making can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume and complexity of data
available from their varied operational and production systems. Making this data
available to a wide audience of business users is one of the most significant
challenges for today's businesses.In response, Persys, Inc. has chosen
Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehousing Framework
to build data warehouses and data marts.
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We implement the following two basic types of data warehouses: enterprise data
warehouses and data marts. Each have their proponents, as well as
their respective strengths and weaknesses.
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Enterprise data warehouse
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Data mart
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The enterprise data warehouse contains corporate-wide information integrated
from multiple operational data sources for consolidated data analysis. Typically
it is composed of several subject areas such as customers, products, and sales
and is used for both tactical and strategic decision making. An enterprise
warehouse contains both detailed point-in-time data and summarized information
and can range from 50 gigabytes to more than one terabyte in total data size.
Enterprise data warehouses can be very expensive and time consuming to build and
manage. They are usually created by centralized IS organizations from the top
down.
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Data marts contain a subset of corporate-wide data that is built for use by
an individual department or division of an organization. Unlike the enterprise
warehouse, data marts are often built from the bottom up by departmental
resources for a specific decision support application or group of users. Data
marts contain summarized and often detailed data about the subject area. This
information in a data mart can be a subset of an enterprise warehouse (dependent
data mart) or more likely come directly from the operational data sources
(independent data mart).
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As an example, a data warehouse may pull information from Human Resources, Project and Procurement, Program Management and other
sources of data and present that data in a usable format such as reports to company's staff such as executives, managers and field staff
or make that information available to public as a sales and marketing tool.
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