A data warehouse is a collection of data from across an enterprise. The purpose of data warehousing is to collect and provide the means tounderstand an enterprise’s data to support strategic planning decisions.
This data is summarized and transformed into information, yet kept in its simplest form. The high level information is used for long term strategy while the detail supports the fine-tuning an enterprise needs.
The data is alive and available to the people that need and use it, unlike the systems that require reports to be done “after hours” (or the proper report has to be written).
Many organizations spend more time gathering information than analyzing it. If you have three days to make a decision, the time spent gathering the relevant information reduces the time available to make the decision. This example shows the true value of a data warehouse.
Oakland County has been able to use Data warehousing to flip the 80/20 ratio (80% data collection to 20% data analysis) around in our subject areas so minimal time is needed to obtain the correct data in the necessary format allowing the most time for decisions.
The concept of Data warehousing began in the early 1990’s but wasn't recognized as a separate discipline until 1996. During this growth period, the terms and concepts involved in data warehousing have changed and evolved, as data warehousing practices have been improved and tested in the industry.
Here at Oakland County, we have been growing our data warehouse since 1997.
