Data Warehousing

The storage of data from a large range of sources for use by other people is referred to as data warehousing. The data stored in these warehouses would normally either be as a result of data mining or will be used for data mining. Web sites and other places store information under various categories and other databases will collect information from a range of sources and all of these activities is called data warehousing.

 

What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse is a collection of data marts containing data from different operations in a company. This data is optimized for querying and data analysis as a data warehouse. Table design, dimensions and organization need to be consistent to allow the creation of reports and queries.

What is a Data Mart?

A data mart is a segment of a data warehouse that provides data on a department within a company, e.g. sales or payroll. Data marts can be complete data warehouses but are usually smaller than the corporate data warehouse.

What are the benefits of data warehousing?

Data warehouses allow queries that can cut across different segments of a company's operations looking for patterns and allowing analysis. Data warehousing is an efficient way to manage and report on data that comes from a variety of sources. It is also an efficient way to manage demand for lots of information from lots of users. Data warehousing provides the capability to analyze large amounts of data for knowledge that can provide an organization with competitive advantage.

 

What is The Difference between Knowledge and Information?

Data becomes information once it is sorted and useable. Information becomes knowledge once it has been analysed.

 

 

See Also: Knowledge Management, data mining,Information systems

Graham Betts 2005