Data Warehouses, Online Analytical Processing, and Metadata

The hub of the business intelligence (BI) environment is the data warehouse. A data warehouse is a centralized repository of data that is compiled from a number of disparate data sources and is useful to power the analytical processing from which business value is derived. For a savvy manager to get the high-level view of the data warehouse, the savvy manager must be aware of the differences between traditional entity-relationship models and dimensional modeling that is more suitable to the data warehouse environment. The importance of data modeling in an analytical context is coupled with managing the metadata associated with the data that evolved as a critical component of the BI environment. The centerpiece of the BI environment is data warehouse, which is a repository of data aggregation from different sources and reconfigured for analytical efficiency. Data marts are more concentrated departmental repositories that are designed for goal-directed analysis and can be used to populate operational online transaction processing (OLAP) databases. Online analytical processing tools enable the data analyst to view comparative aggregated metrics across multiple dimensions allowing for further exploration by drilling down a dimensional hierarchy. The chapter also discusses the use and importance of metadata that acts like a catalog of the intellectual capital that surrounds the creation, management, and use of collected information.