Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

20.2. Data Warehousing

As formally defined by W.H. Inmon, a data warehouse is “a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decisions”. There are following four components of this definition:

• Subject-oriented: Data is arranged and optimised to provide answers to diverse queries coming from diverse functional areas within an organisation. Thus, the data warehouse is organised and summarised around the major subjects or topics of the enterprise, such as customers, products, marketing, sales, finance, distribution, transportation and so on, rather than the major application areas such as customer invoicing, stock control, product sales and others. For each one of these subjects the data ...