Essay: Data Warehousing

Write a short essay (one or two pages) about data warehousing using information available from Internet sources.

Storing information and data are critical to a business and data warehousing is something that businesses do in order to store ALL of their transactional data. To put it very simple, data warehousing is how businesses store all their data electronically. This gives the company the ability to look back at the data for analyzing purposes. As the technology started increasing and computers became more complex people needed to find a way to store more data in the same location (Investopedia, n.d.). Data warehousing helped these businesses and have been used ever since.

One of the most important uses of data warehousing is to store company data so that they can look back over it at any time. This allows a company to look at data from years past and decide on or make changes that can help the company. For example, if a manager looks at data from transactions and notices a pattern, they can make changes due to the patterns they found through the data stored. Without access to this type of information it would be hard for businesses to self-evaluate and implement change, because they will not truly know all the different pieces of data that are essential.

This data is most of the time stored in different charts with all of the data compiled together. In the system that data warehousing uses, OLAP structure, data is organized specifically to facilitate reporting and analysis, not for quick-hitting transactional needs (Health Catalyst, n.d.). This makes it very easy for the people reviewing the data and allows them to not have to search through a ton of different things to find what they are looking for. There are only a couple tables opposed to pages and pages of information, because having fewer tables makes it easier for the users. Data warehousing is the best way to store information in order to pull data effectively.