Lecture Unit on Data Warehousing with a Case Study

Abstract

<p>Data warehousing can be considered as a relatively new and still evolving technology in IT industry. The term data warehouse was coined by Bill Inmon in the early 1990's and he defined it as a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of data for management's decision support systems. The main task of a data warehousing system is to retrieve and integrate data from distributed and heterogeneous information sources, and load the summarized data into a data warehouse for further business analysis.</p> <p>Data warehousing can thus be considered the infrastructure part of the decision support system (DSS) - it supports the information management for business decision making and enables the online analytical processing (OLAP).</p> <p>Date warehousing is not a simple system for small scale businesses - a typical data warehousing system costs on average more than $3 millions of dollars a year for hardware, services, and system integration, according to a survey performed in 1996. On the other hand, a successful data warehousing project can bring in excess of 500% in return on investment. As a result, data warehousing has become a major component of business systems since its conception. Although the technology has more than 15 years of history, new upgrades and products for data warehousing still appear every year.</p> <p>Most people interested in data warehousing can be found in business environments. The educational institutions just began to embark on data warehousing projects only recently. The goal of my thesis is to describe concepts and methods of data warehousing systems in a form of a specialized unit within an undergraduate database course. In particular I focus on data warehouse system architecture, data models, online analytical processing (OLAP), and warehouse data processing.</p> <p>Finally, a case study is included in this thesis to help understand the implementation of a data warehousing system in the commercial environment.</p>