8 SAP BW and DB2
1.1 Data warehousing
Businesses today have to contend with a growing flood of data. And as
companies in virtually every industry have learned, being able to understand that
data is critical to everything from increasing efficiency to retaining customers and
growing revenues. To take advantage of their data, enterprises turned to the
concept of data warehousing. The concept was to pull together large amounts of
data and create a unified, consistent view of customers, operations, and other
areas of the business. This data would then provide the information desperately
needed by enterprise decision makers.
It is important to understand that the term,
enterprise decision maker, does not
refer only to enterprise executives and ...