The Importance Of Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a centralized repository that stores data from multiple information sources and transforms them into a common, multidimensional data model for efficient querying and analysis. According to William H. Inmon, a data warehouse is a “subject-oriented, integrated, time varying, non-volatile collection of data in support of the management’s decision-making process” (Inmon, 1996).

Data warehouse provides an excellent approach for transforming the vast amounts of data that exist in the organizations into useful and reliable information for getting answers to the questions and to support the decision making process. Organizations have vast amounts of data but have found it increasingly difficult to access it and make use of it.

These data is obtained from different operational sources and kept in separate physical store. A data warehouse is not only a relational database that contains historical data derived from transactional data but also it is an environment that includes all the operations and applications to manage the process of gathering data, and delivering it to business users such as extraction, transportation, transformation, and loading (ETL) solution, an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, and client analysis tools.

Data warehouses have no standard definition and the people who work on data warehouse subject have defined it in many ways.

“The basic data warehouse architecture interposes between end-user desktops and production data sources a warehouse that we usually think of as a single, large system maintaining an approximation of an enterprise data model.” (O'Donnell, 2001)

“A data warehouse is a copy of transaction data specifically structured for querying and reporting.” (Kimball et al. 1998, p.19)

In simple words, Data Warehouse can be understood as an integrated data repository containing historical data of a corporation for supporting decision-making processes. A data warehouse provides a basis for online analytic processing and data mining for improving

Thus, the main objectives of the thesis are-

o Identify how many Ministries in our country implements the database and data warehouse concept. o Sketch the architecture of the data warehouse being implemented in the different Ministries. o Identify the supplementary benefits acquired by the different Ministries by implementing DBMS and DW. o Identify the success factors of different architecture of the DW.

1.3 Scope of the Study

In many organizations, data plays very important role. The sources of the data could be from different departments, employee details, salary plan, childeren and womwn populaltion , benifit returns, etc. These data need to be transformed into meaningful and relevent informations which helps government and other concerned personals to make sound decision. This can be done by implementing data warehouse. Different architectures have been used in different Ministries to accomplish this