include Tableau and Google Data Studio.
Data Warehouses
As organizations have begun to utilize databases as the centerpiece of their operations, the need to fully understand and leverage the data they are collecting has become more and more apparent. However, directly analyzing the data that is needed for day-to-day operations is not a good idea; we do not want to tax the operations of the company more than we need to. Further, organizations also want to analyze data in a historical sense: How does the data we have today compare with the same set of data this time last month, or last year? From these needs arose the concept of the data warehouse. The concept of the data warehouse is simple: extract data from one or more of the organization’s databases and load it into the data warehouse (which is itself another database) for storage and analysis. However, the execution of this concept is not that simple. A data warehouse should be designed so that it meets the following criteria: • It uses non-operational data. This means that the data warehouse is using a copy of data from the active databases that the company uses in its day-to-day operations, so the data warehouse must pull data from the existing databases on a regular, scheduled basis. • The data is time-variant. This means that whenever data is loaded into the data warehouse, it receives a time stamp, which allows for comparisons between different time periods. • The data is standardized . Because the data in a data warehouse usually comes from several different sources, it is possible that the data does not use the same definitions or units. For example, each database uses its own format for dates (e.g., mm/dd/yy, or dd/mm/yy, or yy/mm/dd, etc.). In
Information Systems for Business and Beyond (2019) pg. 81
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