Data Warehouse

A data warehouse, “DW” is a system used for reporting and data analysis, and is considered a core component of the business intelligence platform.  DW’s are central repositories, relational databases, of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place and are used for creating analytical reports for knowledge workers throughout the enterprise. 

Dark Star Technology has experience in designing, building and rolling out Data Warehouses to support organizational business intelligence initiatives.  These Data Warehouses can exist on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid of the two.

The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems.  The DW is designed for query and analysis rather than transaction processing, and the data may require cleansing for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting.

The typical Extract, transform, load (ETL) based data warehouse uses staging, data integration, and access layers to house its key functions. The staging layer or staging database stores raw data extracted from each of the disparate source data systems. The integration layer integrates the disparate data sets by transforming the data from the staging layer often storing this transformed data in an operational data store (ODS) database. The integrated data are then moved to yet another database, often called the data warehouse database, where the data is arranged into hierarchical groups, often called dimensions, and into facts and aggregate facts. The combination of facts and dimensions is sometimes called a star schema. The access layer helps users retrieve data.

The main source of the data is cleansed, transformed, cataloged and made available for use by managers and other business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support.