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 of 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

•          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

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

•          Business intelligence – information that people use to support their decision-making efforts

•          Principle BI enablers include:

–      Technology

–      People

–      Culture