Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

4.1 Data Warehouse: Basic Concepts

This section gives an introduction to data warehouses. We begin with a definition of the data warehouse (Section 4.1.1). We outline the differences between operational database systems and data warehouses (Section 4.1.2), then explain the need for using data warehouses for data analysis, rather than performing the analysis directly on traditional databases (Section 4.1.3). This is followed by a presentation of data warehouse architecture (Section 4.1.4). Next, we study three data warehouse models—an enterprise model, a data mart, and a virtual warehouse (Section 4.1.5). Section 4.1.6 describes back-end utilities for data warehousing, such as extraction, transformation, and loading. Finally, Section 4.1.7 presents ...