Data warehouse

Article By:

Gupta, Pranshu Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, DeSales University, Center Valley, Pennsylvania.

Mata-Toledo, Ramon A. Department of Computer Science, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Last reviewed:2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.900101

A data warehouse is an automated warehouse where related information is stored. Users can have access to large amounts of consistent, organized, and related information in a data warehouse. It is advantageous to have access to information from different sources at a centralized location because it is easy to analyze the data at one location, as compared to analyzing data in separate locations. The data can be cleansed, integrated, and organized resulting in generation of historical data, which can be analyzed for patterns that can help in making important business decisions. One of the main advantages of a data warehouse is that it supports decision support system applications. Multiple decision-support environments pose a problem of redundancy because, while they can be operated independently, each environment requires much of the same data. Also, a data warehouse supports data mining, as it can store massive, detailed, and historical data that can be analyzed for known and unknown patterns in different domains. See also: Data mining

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