DWH Week 01

Data Warehouse
Course Instructor:
Assistant Professor Tahir Sabtain
The Compelling need for data
warehousing
History of Decision-Support Systems
• Ad Hoc Reports. This was the earliest stage.
Users, especially from Marketing and Finance,
would send requests to IT for special reports.
• IT would write special programs, typically one for
each request, and produce the ad hoc reports.
• Special Extract Programs. This stage was an
attempt by IT to anticipate somewhat the types of
reports that would be requested from time to time.
• IT would write a suite of programs and run the
programs periodically to extract data from the
various applications.
• Decision-Support Systems. In this stage,
companies began to build more sophisticated
systems intended to provide strategic
information. Again, similar to the earlier
attempts, these systems were supported by
extracted files.
• Executive Information Systems. This was
an attempt to bring strategic information to the
executive desktop. The main criteria were
simplicity and ease of use. The system would
display key information every day and provide
ability to request simple, straightforward reports.
• Small Applications. IT would create simple
applications based on the extracted files. The
users could stipulate the parameters for each
special report.
• The report printing programs would print the
information based on user-specific parameters.
• Information Centers. In the early 1970s, some
major corporations created what were called
information centers. The information center
typically was a place where users could go to
request ad hoc reports or view special information
on screens.
Inability to Provide Information
• IT receives too many ad hoc requests, resulting in a
large overload. With limited resources.
• Requests are not only too numerous, they also keep
changing all the time.
• The users find that they get into the spiral of asking for
more and more supplementary reports
• The users have to depend on IT to provide the
information. They are not able to access the
information themselves interactively.
• The information environment ideally suited for
making strategic decision making has to be very
flexible. IT has been unable to provide such an
environment.
Inability to Provide Information
OPERATIONAL VS DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEMS
• The fundamental reason for the inability to
provide strategic information is that we have
been trying all along to provide strategic
information from the operational systems.
• If we need the ability to provide strategic
information, we must get the information from
altogether different types of systems.
• Only specially designed decision support
systems or informational systems can provide
strategic information.
• Let us understand why.
Making the Wheels of Business Turn
• Operational systems are online transaction processing
(OLTP) systems. These are the systems that are used
to run the day-to-day core business of the company.
• They are the so called bread-and-butter systems.
• Operational systems make the wheels of business
turn.
• They support the basic business processes of the
company. These systems typically get the data into the
database.
• Each transaction processes information about a single
entity such as a single order, a single invoice, or a
single customer.
Making the Wheels of Business Turn
Watching the Wheels of Business Turn
• On the other hand, specially designed and built
decision-support systems are not meant to run the
core business processes.
• They are used to watch how the business runs, and
then make strategic decisions to improve the
business.
• Decision-support systems are developed to get
strategic information out of the database, as
opposed to OLTP systems that are designed to put
the data into the database.
• Decision-support systems are developed to
provide strategic information.
Different Scope, Different Purposes
• Therefore, we find that in order to provide
strategic information we need to build
informational systems that are different from the
operational systems we have been building to
run the basic business.
• It will be worthless to continue to dip into the
operational systems for strategic information as
we have been doing in the past.
• As companies face fiercer competition and
businesses become more complex, continuing
the past practices will only lead to disaster.
How are they different?
DATA WAREHOUSING—THE ONLY VIABLE SOLUTION
• The type of information needed for strategic

decision making is different from that available
from operational systems.
• We need a new type of system environment for
the purpose of providing strategic information
for analysis and monitoring performance.
• Let us examine the desirable features and
processing requirements of this new type of
system environment.
Processing Requirements in the New
Environment
• There are four levels of analytical processing
requirements:
• 1. Running of simple queries and reports against
current and historical data
• 2. Ability to perform “what if ” analysis in many
different ways
• 3. Ability to query, step back, analyze, and then
continue the process to any desired length
• 4. Spot historical trends and apply them for
future results
Business Intelligence at the Data Warehouse
• This new system environment that users desperately
need to obtain strategic information happens to be the
new paradigm of data warehousing.
• This new environment is kept separate from the
system environment supporting the day-to-day
operations.
• The data warehouse essentially holds the business
intelligence for the enterprise to enable strategic
decision making.
• The data warehouse is the only viable solution.
• We have clearly seen that solutions based on the data
extracted from operational systems are all totally
unsatisfactory
Business Intelligence at the Data Warehouse
DATA WAREHOUSE DEFINED
A simple concept of information delivery
• The new concept is not to generate fresh data, but
to make use of the large volumes of existing data
and to transform it into forms suitable for providing
• The data warehouse exists to answer questions
users have about the business, the performance of
the various operations, the business trends, and
about what can be done to improve the business.
• Data warehousing is really a simple concept: Take
all the data you already have in the organization,
clean and transform it, and then provide useful
An Environment, Not a Product
• A data warehouse is not a single software or
hardware product you purchase to provide
• It is, rather, a computing environment where
users can find strategic information, an
environment where users are put directly in
touch with the data they need to make better
decisions.
• It is a user-centric environment.
A Blend of Many Technologies
• The basic concept of data warehousing is:

 Take all the data from the operational systems
 Where necessary, include relevant data from outside
 Integrate all the data from the various sources
 Remove inconsistencies and transform the data
 Store the data in formats suitable for easy access for
decision making
• Although a simple concept, it involves different
functions: data extraction, the function of
loading the data, transforming the data, storing
the data, and providing user interfaces.
A Blend of Many Technologies

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Data Warehouse

• The type of information needed for strategic

• The basic concept of data warehousing is:

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