12.9. Data Repositories

Data Warehouse

Since running analytics against transactional data can bog down a system, and since most organizations need to combine and reformat data from multiple sources, firms typically need to create separate data repositories for their reporting and analytics work—a kind of staging area from which to turn that data into information. Two terms you’ll hear for these kinds of repositories are data warehouse and data mart.

A data warehouse is a set of databases designed to support decision making in an organization. It is structured for fast online queries and exploration. Data warehouses may extract, and aggregate enormous amounts of data from many different operational systems.
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 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. A data mart is a database focused on addressing the concerns of a specific problem (e.g., increasing customer retention, improving product quality) or business unit (e.g., marketing, engineering). 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

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.
• By having a data warehouse, snapshots of data can be taken over time. This creates a historical record of data, which allows for an analysis of trends.
• A data warehouse provides tools to combine data, which can provide new information and analysis.

Privacy Concerns

The increasing power of data mining has caused concerns for many, especially in the area of privacy. In today’s digital world, it is becoming easier than ever to take data from disparate sources and combine them to do new forms of analysis. In fact, a whole industry has sprung up around this technology: data brokers. These firms combine publicly accessible data with information obtained from the government and other sources to create vast warehouses of data about people and companies that they can then sell. Privacy protections were explored in Chapter 9.

“11.5 Data Warehouses and Data Marts” from Information Systems by Minnesota Libraries  is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

“Chapter 4: Data and Databases” from Information Systems for Business and Beyond (2019) by David Bourgeois is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.