Data Warehousing / Data Mining / Business Intelligence

A Data Warehouse is not an individual repository product. Rather, it is an overall strategy, or process, for building decision support systems and a knowledge-based applications architecture and environment that supports both everyday tactical decision making and long-term business strategizing. The Data Warehouse environment positions a business to utilize an enterprise-wide data store to link information from diverse sources and make the information accessible for a variety of user purposes, most notably, strategic analysis. Business analysts must be able to use the Warehouse for such strategic purposes as trend identification, forecasting, competitive analysis, and targeted market research.

Data Warehouses and Data Warehouse applications are designed primarily to support executives, senior managers, and business analysts in making complex business decisions. Data Warehouse applications provide the business community with access to accurate, consolidated information from various internal and external sources.

The primary objective of Data Warehousing is to bring together information from disparate sources and put the information into a format that is conducive to making business decisions. This objective necessitates a set of activities that are far more complex than just collecting data and reporting against it. Data Warehousing requires both business and technical expertise and involves the following activities:

• Accurately identifying the business information that must be contained in the Warehouse
• Identifying and prioritizing subject areas to be included in the Data Warehouse
• Managing the scope of each subject area which will be implemented into the Warehouse on an iterative basis
• Developing a scaleable architecture to serve as the Warehouse’s technical and application foundation, and identifying and selecting the hardware/software/middleware components to implement it
• Extracting, cleansing, aggregating, transforming and validating the data to ensure accuracy and consistency
• Defining the correct level of summarization to support business decision making
• Establishing a refresh program that is consistent with business needs, timing and cycles
• Providing user-friendly, powerful tools at the desktop to access the data in the Warehouse
• Educating the business community about the realm of possibilities that are available to them through Data Warehousing
• Establishing a Data Warehouse Help Desk and training users to effectively utilize the desktop tools
• Establishing processes for maintaining, enhancing, and ensuring the ongoing success and applicability of the Warehouse
  

Data warehousing is the process of integrating enterprise-wide corporate data into a single repository from which end users can easily run queries, make reports and perform analysis. A data warehouse is a decision support environment that leverages data stored in different sources, organizing it and delivering it to decision makers across the enterprise, regardless of their platform or technical skill level.

As an integrated, subject-oriented collection of data, the data warehouse brings together common information from various sources. As a nonvolatile, time-variant collection of data, the data warehouse provides a stable source of information gathered over a period of time.

Pompus understands that the following principles apply to data warehouse development:

1. The design of the data warehouse is based on a data model
2. Data warehouse development is an iterative process
3. Data warehouse support encompasses each step of a normal development process
4. Data warehouse development should utilize reusable components whenever practical

Significant cost benefits, time savings and productivity gains are associated with using a data warehouse for information processing. First, data can be easily accessed and analyzed without time-consuming manipulation and processing. Decisions can be made more quickly and with confidence that the data is both timely and accurate. Integrated information can be kept in categories that are meaningful to profitable operation of the business. Pompus will assist you in achieving these benefits by applying its experience in developing your data warehouse.

Process Flow
The following diagram depicts the dependency relationship between the stages in Data Warehouse Process.