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The Data Warehouse Essays

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A Data Warehouse is a database-centric system of decision support technologies used to consolidate business data from many disparate sources for use in reporting and analysis (Data Warehouse). Data Warehouses and Data Warehouse systems are primary used to server executives, senior management, and business analysts with accurate, consolidated information from various internal and external sources to aid in the process of making complex business decisions (Data Warehouse Process).

The term Data Warehouse was first coined by Bill Inmon, who has been commonly recognized as the “father of data warehousing” and is the lead proponent of the normalized or sometimes referred to as the top-down, approach to Data Warehouse design (Reed, M.)(Data …show more content…

Kimball’s approach also involves the building of business process specific data marts that collect the transactional components of the original data and form them into what are known as “facts” (the data that needs to be measured such as sales or purchases) and links them to well defined dimensions (the data that facts are measured against for instance, the customers that make the purchases, the employees that make the sales, and the dates those transactions occurred). This results in a logical structure commonly referred to as the star-schema data mart. It derives its name from the star like appearance of a central fact table sorrowed by multiple dimension tables with each dimension table linked only to the fact table. The main advantages of the dimensional model over the normalized model are greater performance and quicker time to initial benefit. The dimensional model achieves this performance via the simplified logical structure of the star-schema data mart greatly reducing response-time when reacting to user requests as opposed to the spread

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