¶ … 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...
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…
