Recent Developments in Data Warehousing and its Applications in Business Intelligence (Essay Sample)

Recent Developments in Data Warehousing and its Applications in Business Intelligence
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Recent Developments in Data Warehousing
One of the most valuable assets which if well utilized can significantly improve the decision-making process the general operations and functioning of any organization is information. According to K Bharathi(2005), a data warehouse is defined as a particular discipline oriented, time variant, integrated and a non-volatile collection of data which may originate from multiple possible heterogeneous operational or legacy data sources. The fact that the data contained in warehouses may be part of an already processed queries or a duplicate or part of data obtained from a source or a combination of both makes it a powerful tool for decision-making in businesses and organizations.
In the wake of rapid technological advancements in recent times, one of the significant progress that the database community has witnessed is the use of cloud computing. For many organizations struggling with ever-expanding data volumes and absence of self-service business analytics, cloud data warehousing offers the timely relief of services which appear to have an infinite storage capacity, instant deployment, high accessibility at a little cost.
While traditional data warehouses are consistent and centralized data stores, cloud computing demands the exact opposite. It necessitates that the data location be independent, transparent and able to be shipped functionally (K Bharathi 2005). With Strides in a cloud-based infrastructure, more businesses are bestowing their critical functions of decision-making to the cloud bases data warehouses and mats. In the year 2014 alone, there was a remarkable 6% increase in Percentage, from 25% to 31% in the number of businesses that carried out cloud data warehousing initiatives in large scale.(Doug & Henschen, 2015)
The advantages of cloud warehouse include:
1.) there has been a significant growth in the enabling of self-servicing data access using cloud data integrated services.
2.) through the cloud, the cost of data analysis has been reduced enabling businesses to carry out massive cloud data analysis on an increased scale.
3.). cloud computing reduced the burden of companies having to worry about the continuously increasing complex data volumes allowing the companies to dedicate more time to business productivity
Although cloud data warehousing has grown in use in recent years it has faced one big challenge; most cloud environments have not been configured to suit the typical data housing workloads. This has raised the need for careful analysis of the fit between the company's databases and the available cloud platforms.
Application of Data Warehousing in Business Intelligence
Among one of the core areas that data warehousing has found application is in business intelligence. Business intelligence(BI), is a combination of a variety of a set of techniques, tools and software applications that are used to analyze data and present actionable information to enable informed decision making. Data is collected from both within and without the business. Once collected, the data is checked for errors in preparation for analysis. The data is run against queries that have been developed to generate results in the form of reports, dashboards and visualizations such as charts and graphs which are then availed to cooperate decision makers as well as operational workers.
Businesses collect all sorts...