Data Warehousing For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20. Data Warehousing Driving Quality and Integration

In This Chapter

• Working a data warehouse into your information systems infrastructure

• Understanding data warehouse data stores

• Dealing with inter-organizational conflict

The nature of a data warehouse (that it's composed primarily, or exclusively, of data that comes from elsewhere, other application databases, and is converted into a data asset) means that it can't stand alone as an independent entity within your organization. Here are some examples of the relationships between your data sources and data warehouse:

• Users have requested new data for evolving business needs, which require adding functionality to the data warehouse. In turn, you must review and modify all transformation, movement, quality assurance, and extraction procedures back to the data sources that are impacted by this new functionality and data.

• Changes to an application that provides data to a warehouse likely affect the contents of the data warehouse and how data moves along the path to the warehouse.

• Acquiring another firm drives you to integrate their systems, which are different from yours, with the data warehouse.

• Application developers might undertake an initiative to validate data from your run-the-business operational systems against the data warehouse master data to improve the overall quality of customer data — which can help reduce customer complaints.

In short, a data warehouse is part of a system (probably fairly complex, rather than relatively ...