Enterprise
data warehousing is a topic rarely discussed in non-specialized mass media
simply because the subject is not very attractive to inexperienced writers, not
because the very method to store, process, and analyze data is not
business-critical to a great number of enterprises worldwide. As its name
suggests, data warehousing deals with enterprise databases that are used primarily
to store essential business data and generate reliable reports based on these
data. As a rule, most enterprise data warehouses use a software architecture
layer where information is transformed into data that can be further processed
to produce comprehensive reports provided to managerial staff within an
organization.
The most obvious benefit of enterprise data warehousing
is that data is cataloged and cleaned to to create a uniform database where
business information is stored and retrieved when a report is generated.
Creation of metadata provides great advantages when the matter in question is
to make compatible different databases, for example following a corporate
merger. In addition to metadata creation, enterprise data warehousing
functionality includes methods to maintain data history, which is a crucial
functionality since a good number of source transaction systems do not support
such functionality.
Software developers and software vendors often take
advantage of data warehouses, incorporating the above functionality into
operational business applications to increase their added value. Those business
applications may include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, while
enterprise data warehousing is widely used in enterprise resource planning (ERP)
systems used across a variety of industries. Business software applications
that deal with databases usually require consistent codes to be assigned to
every piece of information, which is made through migration to an enterprise
data warehouse.
In the long-term, all and every functionality listed above
adds to the benefits provided by data warehouses used in business by presenting
the information belonging to an organization in a consistent fashion. Many
industries, both manufacturing businesses and financial institutions, cannot
operate smoothly without such databases and an extremely reliable method to
process the information contained in these data warehouses. The same applies to
a single common data model required by large businesses and government agencies
across the world, while data warehousing as a method is able to provide the
required functionality to all interested parties.
Another advantage, often underestimated, is that data
warehouses are the main tool used to restructure information stored by
organizations into data that can be easily read and understood by users. That
said, data warehousing is really business-critical when under scrutiny is the
ability of a business application to
present data in a way that makes sense to users, both novice and experienced
customers. Data restructuring requires serious software development efforts to
provide reliable results and secure the flawless operation of the respective
business software system, thus those systems can be a costly investment, which,
of course, depends on the size of the business and the complexity of the
databases to be covered by the software.
Last but not least, data restructuring methods applied in enterprise
data warehousing give a marked boost to query performance when analytic queries
are performed, this is a common operation that sometimes causes corporate
servers to go down. Those computer crashes often occur at operating system
level, while data warehouses are designed to reduce operating system load
usually experienced when computers process large volumes of database data.
Therefore, enterprise
data warehousing is undoubtedly a major factor in securing a business
system's uninterrupted operation while the data warehouse itself deals with the
zillions of bits of information a large organization usually stores on its
servers, thus providing marked benefits to both businesses and their respective
customers.
