CHAPTER 8: ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFOAMTION

Data warehouse- a logical collection of information gathered from many different operational databases that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks.
The primary purpose of data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repostory for decision-making purposes.

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNDAMENTALS

Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.
Data mart- contains a subset of data warehouse information

Data mining- the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone
To perform data mining users need data mining tools
Data mining tools- users a variety of techniques to find the patterns and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behaviour and guide decision making.
Databases cintain information in a series of two-dimensional tables
In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows

Information Cleansing or Scrubbing

An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse
Information cleansing or scrubbing is a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorect or incomplete information.

Multimensional Analysis and Data Mining