Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Client/Server Data Systems

There is a tremendous and constantly changing variety of client/server data systems. We'll illustrate the possibilities with two examples—the data warehouse and computer telephony integration.

Data Warehouses

The concept of a data warehouse is usually attributed to IBM. The idea is that information from all of a company's operations are aggregated into a single central database that can be used for decision support. The data warehouse doesn't replace the other databases; rather, it is a replica of portions of them, organized to create reports that span some defined period of time. An example would be a company with a series of transactional databases that are constantly working hard selling airline tickets or whatever. ...