1) Desribe the roles and purpose of data ware-houses and data marts in an organization.
The purpose of the Data Warehouse in the overall Data Warehousing
Architecture is to integrate corporate data. It contains the "single
version of truth" for the organization that has been carefully constructed
from data stored in disparate internal and external operational databases.
The amount of data in the Data Warehouse is massive. Data is stored
at a very granular level of detail. For example, every "sale" that has
ever occurred in the organization is recorded and related to dimensions of
interest. This allows data to be sliced and diced.
2)Explain the relationship between business intelligence and a data warehouse
Many of the tool vendors who sell their products or softwares call it
business Intelligence software rather than Data warehousing software. so
what is
it? Business Intelligence is a term commonly associated with data
warehousing. Business Intelligence is a generalized term where a company
initiates various activities to gather today's market information which
also includes about their competitor. Today's business Intelligence
systems are contrasted to more classical way of information gathering in
mining and crunching the data in the most optimal manner. In short we
can say BI simplifies information discovery and analysis. In this way
the company will have a competitive advantage of business and
intelligently using the available data in strategic and effective
decision making. it has the ability to bring disparate data under one
roof with a meaningful information and ready for analysis.
Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions
on. A data warehousingsystem is the backend, or the infrastructural, component for achieving
business intelligence. Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as
well as unstructured data (thus the need fo content management systems).
Let
me give the path of Data warehousing. All the source data from
disparate sources are used to load/Stage data. Different sources can be
flat files, another database or some other process. The starting point
of the Data warehouse should extract the data in order to load into its
environment.This is extracting. This data may not be the expected format
or size. your business demands are different or your organization
business requirements are different. So the business process has to
modify the data or better word is to transform the incoming data to meet
requirements and objectives. This is called Transformation. Once every
slicing and dicing of the data is done along with applied business
rules, this data is ready for loading into the target tables. This
process is called Loading. So overall till now we have done Extraction,
Transformation and Loading. In short we call this ETL. There are lot of
tools available in today's market which does help in achieving the ETL
process. Once this data is loaded in to the database, this is ready for
next processing. We call that database as Data warehouse database. The
next process could be building of datamarts or directly reporting from
it. There are lot of tools/software available for reporting/analysis.
Some call it business reporting or analysis tool. But if you see the
whole process has intelligence involved in business. we can call this or
the gurus call it Data warehousing and the system involved from end to
end is called business intelligence system.
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