The Data Warehouse

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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 Warehouse). In this Data Warehouse model all organizational data is collected from the source systems at the lowest level of detail, known as “Atomic” data, and storied in the Data Warehouse. This data is then grouped into subsets of the original transactional systems by subject to model specific business processes known as a data mart (for instance, a marketing data mart could contain all the data from across the organization related to the marketing department). This design allows for a great deal of consistency across business processes because all organizational information is loaded into the Data Warehouse at once and all data is link by common dimensions (the data that give transactions their context, such as customers (dimension) to purchases (transactions) or employee (dimension) to sales (transactions)). But, because the scope of this design encompasses all organizational data, which requires the need to model, develop, and deploy the solution as a whole, it results in a significant i...

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