Knowledge Generation - Essay Example

In addition, recommendations would be stipulated on managing benefits and minimizing hazards, as required. The Toolbox for IT defines data warehouse as “a data warehouse is a subject oriented, integrated, time variant, non-volatile collection of data in support of management decision making the process" (Toolbox for IT, 2010, par. 1). In addition, their discourse on data warehouse concepts further averred that data warehouse is “a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than transaction processing.

A data warehouse usually contains historical data that is derived from transaction data. It separates analysis workload from transaction workload and enables a business to consolidate data from several sources” (Toolbox for IT, 2010, par. 5).As the name suggests, the data warehouse is a receptacle of information containing facts, statistics, numbers, characters, symbols or images arranged in a chronological structure which can be processed by a computer (McSweeney, 2010). Accordingly, there are three types of data warehouses, to wit: (1) Enterprise Data Warehouse (a central database), (2) Operational Data Store (updates data to real-time), and (3) Data Mart (data warehouse subsets) (Toolbox for IT, 2010, pars.

7 – 9). Implementation of data warehouses differs according to architecture (Inmon or Kimball) or model (relational or dimensional) as the organization requires.With the bulk of data stored in warehouses, there are ways to analyze them to discover patterns or relationships through data mining.