Essay Data Warehousing
1690 Words
Jan 30th, 2015
7 Pages
Data warehousing is a fairly new but not so new development in the information systems field. Data warehousing can be traced back being in existence since the 1980’s when Teradata in 1983 introduced a database management system (DBMS) designed for decision support systems (Ponniah, 2010). The influence from the two Irish IBM architects Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy who in 1988 laid the foundations for what we call today a data warehouse in their original article “An Architecture for a Business and Information Systems” (Bouman & van Dongen, 2009). It was not long after that Bill Inmon, referred to as the father of data warehousing authored one of the most influential decision support books “Building the Data Warehouse” in 1991(Ponniah,
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What is a Data Warehouse?
Delvin and Murphy as noted earlier defined a data warehouse as a “single logical storehouse of all the information used to report on the business” (Bouman & van Dongen, 2009). Bill Inmon, the father acknowledged father of data warehousing described a data warehouse as “subject oriented, time variant, nonvolatile, and integrated collection of data in support of management decisions” (Inmon, 1996 in Ponniah, 2010). According to Inmon, data warehouses as subject oriented where all entities and events relating to a specific subject are linked together, time variant where all changes to the data are tracked to enable reporting that shows changes over time, nonvolatile where data that is entered into the data warehouse is never overwritten or deleted, and integrated where the data warehouse contains data from multiple source systems after being cleaned and conformed (Bouman & van Dongen, 2009).
In light of the above definitions, a data warehouse in simple terms can be defined as a pool of integrated data designed to support managerial decision making and solving functions. The databases involved serve as a repository of detailed current and historical data of many categories, subjects, or areas which tend to be of potential interest to managers throughout the organization (Turban, Sharda & Delen, 2010).
Data warehouse maintains
Delvin and Murphy as noted earlier defined a data warehouse as a “single logical storehouse of all the information used to report on the business” (Bouman & van Dongen, 2009). Bill Inmon, the father acknowledged father of data warehousing described a data warehouse as “subject oriented, time variant, nonvolatile, and integrated collection of data in support of management decisions” (Inmon, 1996 in Ponniah, 2010). According to Inmon, data warehouses as subject oriented where all entities and events relating to a specific subject are linked together, time variant where all changes to the data are tracked to enable reporting that shows changes over time, nonvolatile where data that is entered into the data warehouse is never overwritten or deleted, and integrated where the data warehouse contains data from multiple source systems after being cleaned and conformed (Bouman & van Dongen, 2009).
In light of the above definitions, a data warehouse in simple terms can be defined as a pool of integrated data designed to support managerial decision making and solving functions. The databases involved serve as a repository of detailed current and historical data of many categories, subjects, or areas which tend to be of potential interest to managers throughout the organization (Turban, Sharda & Delen, 2010).
Data warehouse maintains