Corporate data warehouses

• An information based approach to decision making

• Involvement in highly competitive, rapidly changing markets
with a large, diverse customer base for a variety of products
• Data stored in many systems and represented differently
• Data stored in complex, technical, difficult-to-decipher formats,
making conversion for analysis difficult
Functions
• Allows existing transaction and legacy systems to continue
operation
• Consolidates data from various transaction systems into
coherent set
• Allows analysis of vital information about current operations for
decision support
Types of Data Warehouses
• Physical data warehouses
• Logical data warehouses
• Data library
• Decision support systems

Elements
• Back end
– Building data warehouse
• Preparing data for analysis
– Preparing for business analysis
• Front end
– User retrieval
– Proactive delivery
Advantages
• Timely and accurate information retrieval
• Management of large volumes of information
• Solid basis for DSS
• Online analytic processing

Video-On-Demand
What is Video-On-Demand?
– Storage, transmission, and display of archived video files in a
networked environment
– Most popularly used to watch movies offered by cable provider
– Many companies banking on prospect of bringing Video-on-
Demand to educational institutions.

• Components of Video-on-Demand system

– Network
•Continuous and long-lived connections
– unlike traditional bursty, short-lived computer connections
•Require bandwidths in the range of 1.5Mbps to 5Mbps.
•Delay and jitter must be minimized to preserve presentation.
•Packets which miss deadline must be dropped.

– Server
• Random access
• Short seek time
• Reliability
• Availability
• Scalability

•Server architectures
– Centralized system
•Server and archives stored in central location
•Easy to manage
•Doesn't scale well
•Low throughput
•May add local servers with video buffers
– no archives at local servers, but can forward requests to central
server
» “Matrix” stored at local server, “Police Academy 12” kept in
archive
» Similar to Blockbuster “New Releases” section

– Distributed system
•Local processing servers with archives
•Reduced delay/congestion
•Scales well
•Higher availability and throughput
More difficult to manage