Industrial-strength data warehousing
Arun Sen, Varghese S. Jacob · Communications of the ACM · 1998
This article reports on the importance of implementation of data warehousing in many industries. Developing data warehouses has become a popular but exceedingly demanding and costly activity in information systems development and management. The proportion of companies implementing data warehouses exploded from 10% in 1993 to 90% in 1994, according to market research and consulting firm Meta Group Inc. However, it is agreed by researchers that the data warehouses are built in the interests of business decision support and contain historical data summarized and consolidated from detailed individual records from a number of operational databases. The data in the warehouse is multidimensional and stored in a database. Two components essential for effective management are metadata management and warehouse administration. Tool integration, extraction, scalability, database design, metadata management are some of the key issues that should be considered as part of designing and implementing the data warehousing process.