Data Warehouse and Its Benefits

A data warehouse is a database used for reporting and its subject oriented, integrated, nonvolatile, time variant collection of data helps management in decision making. A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers which includes staging, integration and access. Along with providing cleaned, transformed, cataloged data to the management it also helps to retrieve and analyze data, to extract and transform the load data and to manage the data dictionary, which are also considered as essential components of a data warehousing system.

Benefits of Data Warehouse:

• One of the major benefit of using the data warehouse in the organization is its ability to analyze and execute business decisions based on data from multiple sources.
• A data warehouse provides a common data model for all data and this makes it easier to report, analyze and retrieve information such as sales invoices, order receipts etc.
• Inconsistencies are identified and resolved before the loading data into the data warehouse which simplifies reporting and analysis.
• Information in the data warehouse is under the control of data warehouse users and if the source system data are removed, the information in the warehouse can be stored safely for extended periods of time.
• A data warehouse can provide savings in billing processes, reduce fraud losses, and reduce the cost of reporting when used efficiently by the management.
• The data warehouses can provide analysts with pre calculated reports and graphs and this increases the productivity of business analysts.
• They provide the data without slowing down operational systems as they are independent of operation systems.
• Data warehouses can record historical information for data source tables that are not set up to save an update history.
• Data warehouses can work in conjunction with other business applications like customer relationship management and can enhance their performance.

Data ware houses have much more benefits than the multiple data storage systems. These solve all the problems associated with data management.

Features Offered by Database Management System

Database management system is a computer program which helps to control the creation, maintenance, and the use of a database. In large systems, a DBMS allows users and other software to store and retrieve data in a structured way. The features of DBMS are as follows:

Query Ability:
A database query language and report writer allows the users to interactively interrogate the database, analyze its data and update the data according to the users data needs.

Security:
It is the feature offered by the database management system in which specific individuals or the groups are allowed to access the information in the database with in the organization.

Replication:
Replicates of the original data are created for a distant organization that cannot readily access the original. When the replicates are created between database servers the information remains consistent throughout the database system and users cannot tell or even know which server in the DBMS they are using.

Rule Enforcement:
Certain rules must be applied to the attributes so that the attributes are clean and reliable and these rules should be able to be added and removed as needed without significant data layout redesign.

Computation:
Common computations such as, counting, summing, averaging, sorting, grouping, cross referencing etc are needed by the organizations and the organizations can do such computations with the use of DBMS.

Automated Optimization:
For repeated queries DBMS can adjust themselves to improve the speed of those interactions. DBMS also provides tools for monitoring the performance which allows the experts to make the necessary adjustments after reviewing the statistics collected.

All the above said features make the database management system, very advantageous for an organization.