Chapter 8 - Accessing Organizational Information – Data Warehouse

Hi everyone! now we move to chapter 8 which is accessing organizational information, data warehouse. 

So what is data warehouse?

The data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to day operations, because:

1) Operational information is mainly current – does not include the history for better decision making

2) Issue of quality information

3) Without information history, it is difficult to tell how and why things change over time.

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 combined information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes – data warehouse support only analytical processing

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 warehouse  then send subsets of the information to data mart.

Data mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

Relational Database 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.

Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information

Once a cube of information is created, users can begin to slice and dice the cube to drill down into the information.

Users can analyze information in a number of different ways and with number of different dimensions.

Data mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone. Also known as "knowledge discovery" – computer-assisted tools and techniques for sifting through and analyzing vast data stores in order to find trends, patterns, and correlations that can guide decision making and increase understanding.

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. Eg: retailers can use knowledge of these patterns to improve the placement of items in the layout of a mail-order catalog page or Web page.

INFORMATION CLEANING OR 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

Occur during ETL process and second on the information once if is in the data warehouse

Information cleaning activities

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business intelligence – refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access, analyze data, and information to support decision making effort.

these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.