DATA WAREHOUSE:

THE BUILDING BLOCKS

Chapter2
 Bill Inmon, considered to be the fath
er of DataWarehousing provides the f
ollowing definition:
• “A Data Warehouse is a subject orient
ed, integrated, nonvolatile, and time
variant collection of data in support o
f management’s decisions.”
Integrated Data
 Data Granularity
• In an operational system, data is usua
lly kept at the lowest level of detail.
• In a point-ofsale system for a grocery
store, the units of sale are captured a
nd stored at the level of units of a pr
oduct per transaction at the check-ou
t counter.
Need Summary Data
OVERVIEW OF THE COM
PONENTS
• Source Data Component
OVERVIEW OF THE COM
PONENTS
• Production Data.
– Based on the information requirements
in the data warehouse
– The significant and disturbing characteri
stic of production data is disparity. Your
great challenge is to standardize and tr
ansform the disparate data from the va
rious production systems, convert the d
ata, and integrate the pieces into useful
data for storage in the data warehouse.
OVERVIEW OF THE COM
PONENTS
• Internal Data.
– users keep their “private” spreadsheets
– Profiles of individual customers becom
e very important for consideration.
– Internal data adds additional complexit
y to the process of transforming and int
egrating the data before it can be store
d in the data warehouse.
Information Delivery Co
mponent