A data warehouse is a special database that is designed for advanced analytical reporting of an organization. There are many approaches for building a data warehouse. These typically depend on the reporting requirements of the organization. Most designs are based on either subject-, department- or enterprise-based relationships. This allows an individual to search the data based on a specific data warehouse implementation.
Enterprise reporting requires proper planning and coordination with the business groups in a company. These groups provide the critical information that is necessary to define the layout of tables and data elements within the data warehouse. The implementation depends on the reporting needs of theses specific business units. This determines how the relationships between data will be defined within the database.
A data warehouse is a historical view of the data within an organization. This data is divided into buckets of information, which makes it easier for reporting. Data warehousing requires the configuration of data marts and enterprise information from the transactional databases of a company. A data warehouse implementation is the method used for segregating the information of a company. Some examples of these partitions include financial, customer relationships, sales, and business processes.
A warehouse that is designed for querying people information is an example of a data warehouse implementation. This requires specific data modeling design that supports reporting requirements based on individuals that interact with a company. A data warehouse that is based on people will allow for reports based on specific person data. This typically includes names, age, general biographic data, and biometric data. This type of warehouse is most often used within customer relationship management systems.
Enterprise financial reporting is another form of data warehouse implementation. This is necessary for large organizations that have several unique business lines. A data warehouse is necessary to pull all the business data from each group into one reporting repository. This single view of financial data enables the reporting for sales, profits, and expenses of an entire organization based on regions and marketing trends.
A typical data warehouse includes both fact tables and dimension tables. These fact tables are joined to the dimension tables through special keys that represent the query parameters needed for reporting purposes. The data warehouse implementation is basic design and relationships between these tables.
A sales-based data warehouse is another example of a data warehouse implementation. With this type of design the sales are considered the fact tables necessary for reporting. These fact tables can be configured to map to several dimensions. Some examples of dimension tables include stores, products, and customers. This type of design would allow a user to query sales based on customers, products, or stores within an organization.