By Prof. Dr Muhammad Akram Shaikh & Engr. Nouman Soomro
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY has revolutionized the entire aspects of life; “Data-Data” is being echoed at every juncture of transaction. Some decades before, there was no concept of fierce competition among different companies engaged in enterprise-market. Therefore, all the business was going smoothly, operational level transaction was occurring very well and on-spot decisions were taken usually. Thus, there was no need of long term objectives.
Nowadays the entire spectrum of business has been changed, business process has been automated by computer system with latest technologies related to computer. Consequently, organizations have been exuberantly making investments in computer system since 1970s.
Emerging of new technologies, curiosity for profitability, looking forward to expansion of business and wishing for remaining at top in enterprise-business competition, enforces companies to involve in strategic decision-making by adopting computer technologies. Strategic decisions are made after analyzing a large volume of arranged data, specifically, summarized of all transactional processing data including generation of reports, consist of historical data as well as currently used data, which is known as strategic information. Strategic information usually assists the executives to reach ultimate conclusion.
Some information crises are continuously being come across when some non-calculable measures are taken place and strategic information pattern is ignored. These problems are encountered due to illogical storage of data for example: when data is stored desperately, thus executives can not be able to take decisions upon previous archive data. This archive data may be consisting of months, years, or decades and can raise trouble for users rather than give assistance.
Data Ware House (DWH) provides this strategic information and promises to be new computing environment. DWH provides an integrated and total view of enterprise so executives can be able to transfer their ideas from vision to real facts and figures by accessing current and historical data, enveloped in summarized form of data plus generation of reports for convenience of executives. Myriad volume of data in DWH comes from Online Transaction Process (OLTP). Actually, OLTP is operation oriented and provides data from operation system to DWH. OLTP contains specific data about single entity, single order, single invoice, a single customer.
In contrast, DWH store the data related to all segments of transaction, departments and hold information of entire company. Executives take decisions on DWH basis. Then a question arises that how particular data will be accessed and located? When a lot of data is stored in DWH then mingling of that can be possible. In that case, “Meta data” is a reliable solution of that confusion. It is also called “Data about Data”. Meta data actually performs similar to phone directory in which all records are mentioned properly and arranged in a sequence-wise. Meta data is a road-map for DWH, which indicates the data and its location.
Data mart is another essential facility of DWH for the users, who are apart geographically from central repository or main source of DWH, but users soar necessity of specific view, specific model or any subset of DWH is achieved by data mart in perspective of their requirements. It can be called as a subset of DWH. In 1993, William Inmon known as father of DWH defined DWH as “A data warehouse is subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.”
By applying DWH in large as well as in small organizations strategic information can be obtained, on which, strategic decisions can be exercised. Ultimately organization’s journey would be start on the track of prosperity, profitability and progress by adopting DWH technique.
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Akram Shaikh is a Professor at Software department of MUET, Jamshoro; Engr. Nouman Soomro is a Software Engineer at IT department LUMHS, Jamshoro.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY has revolutionized the entire aspects of life; “Data-Data” is being echoed at every juncture of transaction. Some decades before, there was no concept of fierce competition among different companies engaged in enterprise-market. Therefore, all the business was going smoothly, operational level transaction was occurring very well and on-spot decisions were taken usually. Thus, there was no need of long term objectives.
Nowadays the entire spectrum of business has been changed, business process has been automated by computer system with latest technologies related to computer. Consequently, organizations have been exuberantly making investments in computer system since 1970s.
Emerging of new technologies, curiosity for profitability, looking forward to expansion of business and wishing for remaining at top in enterprise-business competition, enforces companies to involve in strategic decision-making by adopting computer technologies. Strategic decisions are made after analyzing a large volume of arranged data, specifically, summarized of all transactional processing data including generation of reports, consist of historical data as well as currently used data, which is known as strategic information. Strategic information usually assists the executives to reach ultimate conclusion.
Some information crises are continuously being come across when some non-calculable measures are taken place and strategic information pattern is ignored. These problems are encountered due to illogical storage of data for example: when data is stored desperately, thus executives can not be able to take decisions upon previous archive data. This archive data may be consisting of months, years, or decades and can raise trouble for users rather than give assistance.
Data Ware House (DWH) provides this strategic information and promises to be new computing environment. DWH provides an integrated and total view of enterprise so executives can be able to transfer their ideas from vision to real facts and figures by accessing current and historical data, enveloped in summarized form of data plus generation of reports for convenience of executives. Myriad volume of data in DWH comes from Online Transaction Process (OLTP). Actually, OLTP is operation oriented and provides data from operation system to DWH. OLTP contains specific data about single entity, single order, single invoice, a single customer.
In contrast, DWH store the data related to all segments of transaction, departments and hold information of entire company. Executives take decisions on DWH basis. Then a question arises that how particular data will be accessed and located? When a lot of data is stored in DWH then mingling of that can be possible. In that case, “Meta data” is a reliable solution of that confusion. It is also called “Data about Data”. Meta data actually performs similar to phone directory in which all records are mentioned properly and arranged in a sequence-wise. Meta data is a road-map for DWH, which indicates the data and its location.
Data mart is another essential facility of DWH for the users, who are apart geographically from central repository or main source of DWH, but users soar necessity of specific view, specific model or any subset of DWH is achieved by data mart in perspective of their requirements. It can be called as a subset of DWH. In 1993, William Inmon known as father of DWH defined DWH as “A data warehouse is subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making process.”
By applying DWH in large as well as in small organizations strategic information can be obtained, on which, strategic decisions can be exercised. Ultimately organization’s journey would be start on the track of prosperity, profitability and progress by adopting DWH technique.
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Akram Shaikh is a Professor at Software department of MUET, Jamshoro; Engr. Nouman Soomro is a Software Engineer at IT department LUMHS, Jamshoro.
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