CHAPTER 8

ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION (DATA WAREHOUSE)

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNDAMENTALS

• Data warehouse - a logical collection of information (gathered from many different operational databases - that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks) 

• The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes

• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

• Data mart - contains a subset of data warehouse information

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

• Databases contain information in a series or two-dimensional tables
• In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows (Dimension - a particular attribute of information)
• Cube - common term for the representation of multidimensional information

       

• Data mining - the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data                           alone
• To perform data mining, users need data-mining tools

           ⇰ Data-mining-tool - uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large                                                    volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior                                                        and guide decision making

INFORMATION CLEANSING AND SCRUBBING

• An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse
• Information cleansing or scrubbing - a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information
• Contact information in an operational system

• Standardizing Customer name from Operational Systems

• Information cleansing activities

• Accurate and complete information

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

• Business Intelligence - information that people use to support their decision-making efforts
• Principle BI enablers include :

         ↠ Technology

         ↠ People

         ↠ Culture