Accessing Organizational Information –Data Warehouse

Data Warehouse Fundamentals

Data warehouse –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
Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) –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 –contains a subset of data warehouse information

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 –a particular attribute of information

Cube–common term for the representation of multidimensional information
Data mining –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–a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information
Contact information in an operational system