Products & Solutions

What is a data warehouse?

Cone Graph A database warehouse is not a single product. It is an architecture that aligns business imperatives, such as customer knowledge and brand development, with the system structures representing the business. Ranging from a single database to a structure consisting of multiple products from numerous vendors, a data warehouse improves access to a wide range of information.

The data warehouse environment comprises of:

  1. Data sources where data is extracted from
  2. Tools to extract and define data for loading into the data warehouse
  3. A data warehouse database where the data is stored
  4. Desktop query and reporting tools used for decision support

What are the benefits of a data warehouse?

  1. The ability to analyse and manipulate data at unprecedented speeds
  2. The data warehouse can classify data into specific groupings for easier data analysis associated with a single organisational process
  3. It can provide alternate views of historical data to facilitate trend analysis and decision support activities
  4. It contributes to the standardisation of data across the enterprise. When data are extracted from the data sources, they are analysed and transformed before loading into the warehouse
  5. Data are organised to contain only key performance indicators. Extraneous information that is unrelated to executive reporting is left behind
  6. A data warehouse is a decision support system that is exclusively generates your reports. It is separate from the online transaction systems that perform updates, deletes, and inserts on the stored data
  7. Data are updated at scheduled intervals rather than in real-time like Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) systems

Why does your business need a data warehouse?

Date Warehouse

A data warehouse allows you to seamlessly integrate high quality data with powerful, fast analysis tools. Companies frequently suffer from information management problems, as data is stored in a variety of operational systems, formats and computing platforms. Vital information is locked away, ensuring outsiders are unable to provide the complete picture of your business operations. Usually data stored in transaction collection systems such as billing, reservations, inventory and production control are not organised or aggregated in a way to facilitate decision support activities. A data warehouse is a mechanism for delivering improved information access, providing higher quality decision support essential for customer relationship management.

How is the data warehouse analysed?

GraphData are efficiently stored for query analysis and reporting, in a data storage structure known as a multi-dimensional data cube. These data cubes are aggregated on a scheduled basis. The data warehouse is queried using On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) applications, enabling data modeling, reporting and decision support.

The multi-dimensional cubic data structure permits OLAP tools to focus on specific values and quickly retrieve alternate views of different combinations of the information dimensions. These tools are designed to provide users with a set of features aimed at making critical decision support easier.

Some of the functions provided are:

  1. Data navigation using drill down menus to manage summary and detailed information
  2. Data can be shown in multi-dimensional views of the data not limited to a conventional two-dimensional view
  3. Rotation of dimensions for alternate views of the same core data set
  4. Charting and trend analysis to visualise the data relationships more easily
  5. Ranking and exception reporting to see highs and lows or isolate key data
  6. Data mining to search for unexpected relationships between data
  7. Row/column matrix cross tabulation reporting to show total or average balances