Chapter 2

The Data Warehouse

2.1. Introduction

In the first chapter, business intelligence (BI) was defined and a review of its possible applications in selected business areas was presented. The background for those solutions consists of basic BI tools. However, before we look at these in depth, we should look at the technological aspect of BI systems, that is, the structure of data warehouses. It seems obvious that the previous examples of business solutions use various data. However, this chapter answers the question of how data are collected and organized in order to be applied to business analysis.

Figure 2.1 shows the standard structure of a data warehouse. On the left, there are examples of sources of data—for example, logistics data ...

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