Find an example of an actual data warehouse. For this example, describe the cont

Question

Find an example of an actual data warehouse. For this example, describe the content, purpose, user access methods, and sources of data (what on-line transaction processing [OLTP] databases feed data into the data warehouse) - (make sure that your example is not just a normalized OLTP database that someone has mistakenly misnamed a data warehouse or data mart, or just a vendor's advertisement/description of their product). In addition to answering the question above, to get full credit on this assignment your data warehouse should be publically accessible so that the rest of the class and I can experience it.

Refrence or URL to the above explanation would be greatly appreciated.

Explanation / Answer

A data warehouse is a database designed to enable business intelligence activities: it exists to help users understand and enhance their organization's performance. It is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing, and usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but can include data from other sources. Data warehouses separate analysis workload from transaction workload and enable an organization to consolidate data from several sources. This helps in:

Maintaining historical records

Analyzing the data to gain a better understanding of the business and to improve the business

In addition to a relational database, a data warehouse environment can include an extraction, transportation, transformation, and loading (ETL) solution, statistical analysis, reporting, data mining capabilities, client analysis tools, and other applications that manage the process of gathering data, transforming it into useful, actionable information, and delivering it to business users.

To achieve the goal of enhanced business intelligence, the data warehouse works with data collected from multiple sources. The source data may come from internally developed systems, purchased applications, third-party data syndicators and other sources. It may involve transactions, production, marketing, human resources and more. In today's world of big data, the data may be many billions of individual clicks on web sites or the massive data streams from sensors built into complex machinery.

Data warehouses are distinct from online transaction processing (OLTP) systems. With a data warehouse you separate analysis workload from transaction workload. Thus data warehouses are very much read-oriented systems. They have a far higher amount of data reading versus writing and updating. This enables far better analytical performance and avoids impacting your transaction systems. A data warehouse system can be optimized to consolidate data from many sources to achieve a key goal: it becomes your organization's "single source of truth". There is great value in having a consistent source of data that all users can look to; it prevents many disputes and enhances decision-making efficiency.

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