benefits of data warehouse
What are the benefits of data warehousing ?
What is Data warehouse ? Data warehouse is a concept, a logical term for a database designed to efficiently answer business analytical questions, these databases are designed to hold historical data, the data can be stored in tables (rows and columns) known as ROLAP, multidimensional cubes (OLAP cube) called MOLAP, or even in new Hybrid OLAP (mix of both cubes and tables). In easy words data warehouse contain read only data for analysis purpose.
A proper well designed data warehouse have a very high ROI (return on investment), the data warehousing benefits can be unlimited, depending on your industry from simple basic analytics, profitability analysis to risk assessment and business trends.
Single source to get answers, now a days many companies use multiple systems to store operations data, making it hard to connect several different systems, but data warehouse can make reporting easier from multiple data sources.
Data warehousing can help a business to predict future trends and behaviors through data mining.
Data warehouses allow businesses to make better, proactive, knowledge driven decisions.
Generally data warehouse designers remove inconsistencies before loading data, simplifying to understand data and this process also simplifies reporting.
Data warehouses are designed to perform better with aggregate queries running on large amounts of data.
The structure of data warehouse makes it easier for end users to navigate, understand and query the data, unlike the relational databases primarily designed to handle lots all kind of transactions.
Data warehouses provide fast retrieval of data without slowing down operational systems if they are separate from OLTP system.
Data warehouses enable queries that can cross reference different segments of a company's operation. Human resource department data could be compared against finance data even if they were originally stored in different databases with different structures.
Complex queries which consume time and resources in normalized databases could be easier to build and maintain in data warehouses, decreasing the workload on OLTP databases(transaction systems).
Data warehousing is an efficient way to manage and report on data that is from a variety of sources, non uniform and scattered throughout a company.
Data warehouses can even help businesses to find patterns, information and report data which was hidden or was not possible with OLTP database systems.
Data warehousing is an efficient way to manage demand for lots of information from lots of users.
Data warehousing provides the ability to analyze large amount of historical data with fast response time.
Data warehouse allows management to make well informed, better business decisions. Data warehouses are also known as DSS (decision support system).