If Business intelligence is described as...
"a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes"
...then the Data Warehouse exists at the very core of a Business Intelligence solution.
What is a Data Warehouse?
An organisation’s BI capability is often only as good as the data warehouse that feeds information to business users.
A Data Warehouse, as the name suggests, is a specialised database containing a massive collection of information from across an organisation, usually consisting of data from a diverse range of operational business systems. The information is clean, structured, and easily accessible. A data warehouse is often referred to as the:
"one source of truth"
At DATAMetrics we know Data Warehousing. We have built and maintain dozens of DWs, and they are the single most powerful tool available to any BI solution.
Data Warehouses are built to answer questions you ask of your information, and we build them with the knowledge that we don't yet know what you are going to ask of it. We build a Data Warehouse with your un-thought-of questions in mind.
Nine out of ten times, a data warehouse will have been modelled as a series of “star-schemas”, named as such due to the visual appearance when modelled.
Star-schema data models utilise Dimension and Fact tables. Dimensions hold the business definitions or reference data and the fact tables hold the metrics or measures. Put simply, the dimensions hold textual data and the fact tables hold numerical data. The fact is usually an intersection of several dimension and allows us to ask questions of the data.
“What products have been bought by customers in the ABC store in the month of October?”