Chapter 8: Accessing Organisation Information

☆  بِسْــــــــــــــمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيْـــــمِ  ☆

Data Warehouse Fundamentals :

• Data warehouse - a logical collection of information gathered from many different operational databases that supports business analysis activities and decision making tasks.
• Primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository decision-making purposes.
• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transform the information using a common set of interprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.
• Data mart - contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

• Relational Database contains information in a series of two-dimensional tables.
• In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows

- Dimension ( a particular attribute of information )

- Cube ( common term for the representation of multidimensional information.)

• Once a cube of information is created, users can begin to slice and dice the cube to drill down into the information.
• Users can analyze information in a number of different ways and with number of different dimensions.

Data Mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone. Also known as “knowledge discovery” – computer-assisted tools and techniques for sifting through and analyzing vast data stores in order to finds trends, patterns and correlations that can guide decision making and increase understanding.

To perform data mining users need data-mining tools:

• Data-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to finds patterns and relationships in large volumes of information. Eg: retailers and use knowledge of these patterns to improve the placement of items in the layout of a mail-order catalog page or Web page.

Informational Cleansing or Scrubbing

• An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse.
• Information cleansing or scrubbing – A process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect or incomplete information.
• Occurs during ETL process and second on the information once if is in the data warehouse.
• Contract information in an operational system.
• Standardizing customer;s  name from Operational System
•  Information cleansing activities       

                  -   Redundant Records

                  -   Missing Keys or Other Required Data

                  -   Erroneous Relationships or References

                  -   Inaccurate Data

                  -   Missing Records or Attributes

                  -    Accurate and complete information

Business Intelligence – refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provides access, analyze data and information to support decision making efforts.

These systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.