What is a Data Warehouse?

Data Warehouse

Because it encompasses all of an organization’s areas of interest, a data warehouse has a wide range of operations. Data mart encompasses a particular subset of enterprise-wide data. The portion of data covered by the data mart is primarily of interest to a specific user group. Virtual warehouses provide on-demand views that are then displayed on operational databases.

Features of a Data Warehouse

These are the four primary characteristics of a data warehouse:

Subject-oriented – The structure of a data warehouse emphasizes the most important subjects: sales, customers, and products. A data warehouse organizes data according to the subject rather than the application. Unlike the various company products, an insurance company might organize its data warehouse by customer, claim, and premium.

Integrated – The construction of a data warehouse requires the integration of various heterogeneous sources, such as flat files, online transaction processing (OLTP), and relational databases. Data encoding is typically inconsistent when stored in multiple applications in their respective operating environments. Data movement from the operational environment to the data warehouse adheres to a consistent coding standard.

Nonvolatile – A data warehouse is a repository of physically distinct data converted from application data in the appropriate environment. Important separation because data warehouses do not need transaction processing, concurrency control, or recovery. Once data is loaded into a data warehouse, it can only be refreshed, accessed for queries, or loaded but never modified.

The primary purpose of storing data in the data warehouse is to provide historical context. The data warehouse’s key structures contain either an explicit or implicit time element.

Data-mining Techniques

Techniques for data mining are divided into two major categories:

The descriptive method is a technique for describing data by identifying human-interpretable patterns. Data mining groups together similar documents returned by the search engine based on their context…