The recent outburst of Business Intelligence applications use in enterprises, and the way enterprises are getting helped by collecting, analyzing, warehousing and mining data is watched with great curiosity in the knowledge industry. Of all the Business Intelligence subjects we have seen, Data Warehousing is the largest in market size. In addition to the data itself, the technologies, tools, methodologies, hardware, software, storage systems are constituent to this. Let’s see some data warehousing concepts.
Data warehousing is said to be coined by Bill Inmon in the year 1990. He gave a definition to Data Warehousing as
A warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision making process
Subject Oriented will mean that the collected data should be particular about a single subject. Integrated will mean that the data is collected from various sources and organized properly. The data thus organized has to be related to periods of time. Non Volatile is used in the sense that it cannot be manipulated.
It is natural that business intelligence is closely related to data warehousing. There are several concepts in data warehousing. Data models like Logical, Physical, Conceptual and Dimensional models, Schemas, OLAP etc., can be mentioned as data warehousing concepts.
Business worldwide consider data warehouse as a single piece of repository and a single source of valuable information. As companies consider information available with them as the most valuable asset for business sustenance and growth, they give a lot of importance to data warehousing. Decision making is enabled from floor level to board with this data warehousing platform.
However to be successful, companies need to pay attention to;
- Quality of the data collected and available,
- Underlying architecture,
- Its TCO or total cost of ownership
- Easy access to all stakeholders
- Real time interactive use,
- Scalability with the growth of the company
- Adjustable to varied workloads
The selection of a database warehousing software is guided by existing database management system available with the company and the exact requirement for achieving business goals.
As we can note in most of the business intelligence space, the mega vendors, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft dominate the vendor space in data warehousing, also.
IBMs Infosphere is one the top end offering. IBM Infosphere warehouse solution promises to deliver the industry’s need of fully integrated system with capabilities ranging from optimized use of standard XML data, deeper analytical features with DB2, high data availability and security.
Oracle on the other hand Oracle claims that they are the leaders in data ware housing, with its recent Oracle Database 11g offering and Exadata . With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is claiming that, coupled with Sun SPARC Enterprise server the offer the best price per performance over data warehousing.
Microsoft is having the largest number of Microsoft SQL Server database installations in the world. With its Ms SQL Server 2005, 2008 and expected 2010 Servers, the bundled solutions are projected as the best strategy for organizations. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 ships now with more business intelligence and data warehousing value built on data base system.
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- Malick Md
- PMP, Technology Expert And Writer
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