Business and Database

¶ … Data storage for today's businesses [...] why a business has separate databases and a data warehouse, and why it does not have just one large database for all its data, both current and historical. Data warehouses help staff evaluate specific data more effectively, and bring together large amounts of data that might not be easily accessible in one massive database.

Storage of Data The storage of data for today's businesses is a complicated issue, compounded by the need to access data quickly, while still ensuring the data is easily accessible to the staff that need it, and can be combined to utilize all the data from several single databases that might not be easily mined and evaluated from database to database. Keeping separate databases along with a data warehouse makes good business sense for a number of reasons.

One of the main reasons many businesses utilize data warehousing is to save costs. Although the initial startup costs can be steep, as one expert noted: "What, for instance, is the asset-size threshold for an institution to be able to build a data warehouse? Estimates ranged from a quarter of a billion dollars to $10 billion" (O'Sullivan 42), the results can be cost effective. For example, Provident Bank's savings run $154,500 per year after installing their data warehouse, and that does not include the employee salaries saved by warehousing (O'Sullivan 44).

Besides saving money, data warehousing allows staff to sift through data more quickly and effectively, since all the data is warehoused in one place. As one expert explained, "Managers began to realize that mining larger amounts of data in a data warehouse could result in more accurate information summaries and possible increased accuracy in trend analysis" (Chopoorian et al. 45). Data warehousing and mining data from those warehouses is cost effective, takes less time, and can give a more balanced look at data, since data from all databases is included.

Businesses may still keep many different databases on their own server for quick access by staff, but the information warehoused is available to everyone that needs it, and so it can combine data that might not be combined from access to only a single database. Since data is mostly stored in a variety of locations and formats, data from heterogeneous sources must be blended to create a data warehouse capable of supporting data mining and decision-making.

The warehousing process employs electronic means to merge data from cross-multiple platform sources, reformat it, and then structure it in a way to support developing a macro view of information for executive users and more detailed information to operational users (Chopoorian et al. 45). Data warehouses can be small or large, depending on the needs of the business. "Mini-warehouses," or "datamarts" are designed for one specific function, such as marketing or sales, and they only mine information useful to that department.

Enterprise-wide warehouses encompass all the data from an organization, making all the information more readily available for analysis and evaluation ("Turning Data" 3). Therefore, data warehouses are useful for just about any organization, small or large, and can pay for themselves in a short time if they are utilized effectively. Even though the data in a data warehouse is usually not updated, it is readily available for study, and, gathered in one central point as it is, can give valuable clues to a businesses' operations, including customer purchasing, customer.