Data Warehouse, OLAP and Reporting Systems

Data warehouses are systems for storing and analyzing data (such as sales information) to gain insight into the past performance of an organization. The ultimate goal of such a system is to help management to make informed business decisions.

 The typical data warehouse system consists of the following components:

• Staging area - The data warehouse system is usually fed from an OLTP system. Information from the OLTP system is collected in the staging area (which could be a database or simply files on a server).
• Data Repository - Before information is loaded into a data warehouse, it must be cleansed to resolve data integrity problems.
• Data Warehouse - This is a central database of all information collected from the field. It exists is in the form of a denormalized star-join schema to improve query performance.
• Data Marts - To improve query performance, information can be aggregated into data marts. These usually contain subsets of information from the data warehouse and are therefore focused on specific issues.
• Report and Query Tools These can be used against the data warehouse or against specific data marts. Microsoft provides Excel Pivot tables as a basic query tool, but custom solutions can be developed that will allow your employees to use reports over the Web using report generators or advanced tools such as English Query that allow queries in natural language.

Call to Action

• Are your reports slowing down your existing systems?
• Do your employees need to go on a coffee break when they start execution of a report?
• Do you need reporting system that is available 7 x 24?
• Do you need internationalized reports and database solutions?

If you are thinking about building or upgrading your data warehouse system, give us a call. We can explain the advantages and present a coherent plan to make your upgrade painless and cost-effective.