What is Data Warehouse?
Data Warehouse, abbreviated as DW, is an integration center that stores large amounts of data. The purpose of a data warehouse is to build an integrated, analytics-oriented data environment to provide Decision-Support for an organization, which provides certain BI capabilities, guides business process improvement, and monitors time, cost, quality, and control.
The input side of the data warehouse is a variety of data sources, and the final output is used in the direction of data analysis, data mining, and data reporting for the organization.
Characteristics of Data Warehouse
1、Thematic
Unlike traditional databases corresponding to one or more projects, the data warehouse according to the actual needs of users, data from different data sources in a higher level of abstraction to do the integration of all data around a certain theme to organize.
2、 integration
Data stored in the data warehouse is derived from the integration of multiple data sources, the original data from different data sources, stored in different ways. To integrate into the final data collection, it needs to go through a series of extraction, cleaning and conversion processes from the data sources.
3、Stability
The data stored in the data warehouse is a series of historical snapshots that are not allowed to be modified. Users can only query and analyze through analysis tools.
4、 time-varying
The data warehouse receives new integrated data on a regular basis, reacting to the latest data changes.
The role of the data warehouse
1、Storage
In the merge (extract and load) step, the data warehouse will receive and store data from multiple data sources.
2、Processing
In the processing (transformation and modeling) step, the data warehouse will handle most (or all) of the intensive processing workload generated by the transformation step.
3、 access
In the report generation (visualization and delivery) step, reports need to be first collected in the data warehouse, and then visualized and delivered to end users.
Why build a data warehouse
1、 the data warehouse can summarize multiple data sources
General enterprises have multiple data sources, data are distributed in different databases, enterprises in the business decision-making usually need to be combined with the company's various business data for comprehensive statistical analysis, so you need to synchronize the source data to a data system library.
2、Improve the quality of enterprise data
The data of the business lines of the enterprise may have a lot of data errors, or data caliber inconsistencies, the construction of a data warehouse can effectively avoid these problems.
3、Improve efficiency
Building a data warehouse can improve the efficiency of troubleshooting, data development and communication.
4、Establish enterprise data model
Through the data warehouse, you can establish the enterprise's data model, which is of great significance to the production and sales, cost control and income and expenditure distribution, greatly saving the cost of the enterprise and improving economic efficiency. Data warehouse organizes the data of an enterprise in a specific way, which generates new business knowledge and brings new perspectives to the operation of the enterprise.
Conclusion
The establishment of a data warehouse is a process of solving the application of enterprise data problems, which is an essential step in the development of enterprise informationization to a certain stage, and is also an important basis for the development of data-based management.