The data warehouse is a kind of data storage.
In practice, it is a data management and organization system designed to perform their analysis.
The data within a data warehouse are: application log files and transaction applications.
Furthermore, it allows organizations to derive business insights from their data enabling the improvement of decision-making processes.
Types of Data
The data managed by the warehouse are divided into:
- Operational data: information generated by administrative and accounting systems;
- Scheduled data: operational data such as collection, storage, and organization for analysis.
The data warehouse serves as a foundation for data mining and is considered the only reliable source of an organization.
Moreover, before uploading data into the warehouse, it is necessary to encode them.
An organization's data can come from both internal company sources and external sources:
- Internal Data: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Customer relationship management (CRM), and Content management (CMS), operational databases, flat files (e.g., Excel, CSV, text files), emails;
- External Data: applications and systems of external suppliers, websites/Internet, social media, cloud services.
The extracted data are stored and preserved permanently for future analysis.
Structure of a data warehouse
The data warehouse can be structured in various forms, which include:
- Simple structure: they share a basic structure where there are metadata, summary data, and raw data;
- Simple structure with a staging area: data must be cleaned and processed before being placed into the warehouse;
- Hub and spoke structure: allows an organization to customize their own data warehouse;
- Sandbox structure: private, secure, and safe areas that enable companies to explore in a quick and informal manner.
The methods for data evaluation and analysis are made available to the end user with various tools: reporting and querying tools, collaboration, data mining, online analytical processing up to executive information systems.
The benefits of using a data warehouse
Data warehouses allow organizations to analyze large amounts of data and maintain a historical record of it.
Among the advantages of a data warehouse are:
- Better decision-making processes;
- Consolidation of data from multiple sources;
- Historical data analysis;
- Data accuracy;
- Improved performance.
The creation of the data warehouse, backup, and updating are performed without complexity, allowing organizations to focus on activities that add value to their business.
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