data warehouse architecture

A White Paper by Ken Orr
©Copyright 1996 by The Ken Orr Institute; revised edition, 2000

1.1) "Data in Jail" - the Data Access Crisis

If there is a single key to survival in the 1990s and beyond, it is being able to analyze, plan and react to changing business conditions in a much more rapid fashion. To do this, top managers, analysts and knowledge workers in our enterprises need more and better information.

Information technology itself has made possible revolutions in the way that organizations today operate throughout the world. But the sad truth is that in many organizations despite the availability of more and more powerful computers on everyone's desks and communication networks that span the globe, large numbers of executives and decision makers can't get their hands on critical information that already exists in the organization.

Every day organizations large and small create billions of bytes of data about all aspects of their business, millions of individual facts about their customers, products, operations and people. But for the most part, this data is locked up in a myriad of computer systems and is exceedingly difficult to get at. This phenomenon has been described as "data in jail".

Experts have estimated that only a small fraction of the data that is captured, processed and stored in the enterprise is actually available to executives and decision makers. While technologies for the manipulation and presentation of data have literally exploded, it is only recently that those involved in developing IT strategies for large enterprises have concluded that large segments of the enterprise are "data poor."

1.2) Data Warehousing - Providing Data Access to the Enterprise

Recently, a set of significant new concepts and tools have evolved into a new technology that makes it possible to attack the problem of providing all the key people in the enterprise with access to whatever level of information needed for the enterprise to survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive world.

The term that has come to characterize this new technology is "data warehousing." Data Warehousing has grown out of the repeated attempts on the part of various researchers and organizations to provide their organizations flexible, effective and efficient means of getting at the sets of data that have come to represent one of the organization's most critical and valuable assets.

Data Warehousing is a field that has grown out of the integration of a number of different technologies and experiences over the last two decades. These experiences have allowed the IT industry to identify the key problems that have to be solved.

http://www.kenorrinst.com/dwpaper.html

Data Warehouse Solutions

· e-Business Intelligence
· Re-Engineering of DW applications
· CRM Data Warehouse
· Data Warehousing Implementation
· Data delivery applications
· Data integration

Case Studies
· Business Management System
· Data Warehouse WAP System
· Cell-phone Users Survey
· BI Platform Development
· Data Warehouse Reporting Portal

Data warehouse Technologies

OLAP tools:MicroStrategy, Brio, Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Informix Metacube

ETL tools: Informatica, Datastage, Datajunction, DataMirror

Databases: Oracle, MS SQL Server 2000, Sybase, DB2, Informix, Redbrick, Teradata;

Datamining Tools: SAS Miner, Intelligent Miner;

End to end tools: SAP Business Warehouse suite and Oracle Data Warehousing product suite

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