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Friday, 25 January 2013

Chapter 8 : Accessing Organizational Information - Data Warehouse



Learning Outcomes

1.     Compare the multidimensional nature of data warehouses (and data marts) with the two-dimensional nature of databases.

o    Databases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables, which means that you can only ever view two dimensions of information at one time.  In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows.  Each layer in a data warehouse or data mart represents information according to an additional dimension.  Dimensions could include such things as products, promotions, stores, category, region, stock price, date, time, and even the weather.The ability to look at information from different dimensions can add tremendous business insight.
2.     Identify the importance of ensuring the cleanliness of information throughout an organization.

o    An organization must maintain high-quality information in the data warehouse.

o    Information cleansing and scrubbing is a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information.

o    Without high-quality information the organization will be unable to make good business decisions.

3.     Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization.

o    The primary purpose of data warehouses and data marts are to perform analytical processing.

o    The insights into organizational information that can be gained from analytical processing are instrumental in setting strategic directions and goals.

4.     Explain the relationship between business intelligence and a data warehouse.
o    A data warehouse is an enabler of business intelligence. The purpose of a data warehouse is to pull all kinds of disparate information into a single location where it is cleansed and scrubbed for analysis.

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