All about: Data warehousing

Data warehousing is the act of collecting a disparate amount of resources in one place so that they can be accessed for information retrieval at a later point. It usually refers to a company's data that has been electronically stored in one location in an effort to streamline the reporting and analysis process. The practice is said to have begun in the 1960s when a joint partnership between General Mills and Dartmouth College saw them developing the terms dimensions and facts.

History and future

History
In the 1970s, Bill Inmon, an American computer scientist who would later become known as the father of data warehousing, began using the term. In the mid-1970s, Sperry Univac introduced a database management and reporting system for building information centres. Ten years later, Metaphor Computer Systems released a hardware/software package for the creation of database management. In 1995, the Data Warehousing Institute was founded, and a year later, Ralph Kimball published his book entitled The Data Warehouse Toolkit. Future
In the near future, data warehousing will have taken on an even greater significance. Analysts predict that business units will control 40 per cent of the budget for business intelligence, and the number of international companies who fail to make the correct decisions because of a lack of information tools such as warehousing solutions.

Layers, advantages and disadvantages

Layers
There are three layers pertinent to data warehousing. Staging is the first - it entails storing data that has not been processed. Integration is the second - it entails integrating the unprocessed or raw data. Finally, there is the access layer which ensures that data can be accessed by users. Advantages
There are several advantages to data warehousing. Notably, they store and present data in such a way that it helps business executives to make crucial decisions. Another benefit is that data warehousing allows an executive to see a company as a whole entity rather than a sum of its parts. In addition, data warehouses have the ability to handle server tasks with respect to queries. This is not something that many other transaction systems can do. Disadvantages
The moving of so much disparate data to one source is time-consuming, involves high costs, and does not allow for sufficient flexibility. In addition, data owners may lose control of their data.