Building Blocks of a Warehouse

Building Blocks of a Warehouse

A Data Warehouse has the following major components-

Source Data: Sources from where the data actually enters a warehouse and this can be of the following categories- Production data, Internal Data, Archived data and External data.

Data Staging: Once we have acquired all the data it goes through the Stating area where the data is prepared to enter the warehouse. It has 3 major functions involved- Extraction of data, Transformation of Data and Loading of data.

Data Storage: Storage for a warehouse is kept separate from the Operational Systems storage because of the following reasons-

• -        Warehouse data contains volumes of historical data for analysis.
• -        Data is present in structures that are suitable for analysis.

Information delivery: As the user’s requirements are different thus the data should be delivered in a way that must support all the user’s requirements. Thus, there are multiple types if information delivery available such as-

• -        Ad-hoc reports
• -        Complex queries
• -        MD analysis
• -        Statistical Analysis
• -        EIS Feed
• -        Data mining

All the above are are effectively depicted in the Diagram below-

Thus these ares can be categorized into the following-

Data Acquisition , Data Storage and Information delivery also represented in the above Diagram -

While defining the architecture of the warehouse, the following factors must be considered-

• Consider the number and extent of the data sources.
• How many legacy systems are you going to extract the data from?
• What are the external sources?
• Are you planning to include departmental files, spreadsheets, and private databases?
• What about including the archived data?