DATA WAREHOUSING FUNDAMENTALS: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Professionals

14.2. INFORMATION FROM THE DATA WAREHOUSE

As an IT professional, you have been involved in providing information to the user community. You must have worked on different types of operational systems that provide information to users. The users in enterprises make use of the information from the operational systems to perform their day-to-day work and run the business. If we have been involved in information delivery from operational systems and we understand what information delivery to the users entails, then what is the need for this special study on information delivery from the data warehouse?

Let us review how information delivery from a data warehouse differs from information delivery from an operational system. If the kinds of strategic information made available in a data warehouse were readily available from the source systems, then we would not really need the warehouse. Data warehousing enables the users to make better strategic decisions by obtaining data from the source systems and keeping it in a format suitable for querying and analysis.

14.2.1. Data Warehouse Versus Operational Systems

Databases already exist in operational systems for querying and reporting. If so, how do the databases in operational systems differ from those of the databases in the data warehouse? The difference relates to two aspects of the information contained in these databases. First, they differ in the usage of the information. Next, they differ in the value of the information. Figure ...