order for the data warehouse to match up dates, a standard date format would have to be agreed upon and all data loaded into the data warehouse would have to be converted to use this standard format. This process is called extraction-transformation-load (ETL). There are two primary schools of thought when designing a data warehouse: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach starts by creating small data warehouses, called data marts, to solve specific business problems. As these data marts are created, they can be combined into a larger data warehouse. The top- down approach suggests that we should start by creating an enterprise- wide data warehouse and then, as specific business needs are identified, create smaller data marts from the data warehouse.
Benefits of Data Warehouses
Data Warehouse Process (top-down)
Organizations find data
warehouses quite beneficial for a number of reasons: • The process of developing a data warehouse forces an organization to better understand the data that it is currently collecting and, equally important, what data is not being collected. • A data warehouse provides a centralized view of all data being collected across the enterprise and provides a means for determining data that is inconsistent. • Once all data is identified as consistent, an organization can generate “one version of the truth”. This is important when the company wants to report consistent statistics about itself, such as revenue or number of employees.
Information Systems for Business and Beyond (2019) pg. 82
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