4.6 Summary

■ A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile data collection organized in support of management decision making. Several factors distinguish data warehouses from operational databases. Because the two systems provide quite different functionalities and require different kinds of data, it is necessary to maintain data warehouses separately from operational databases.

■ Data warehouses often adopt a three-tier architecture. The bottom tier is a warehouse database server, which is typically a relational database system. The middle tier is an OLAP server, and the top tier is a client that contains query and reporting tools.

■ A data warehouse contains back-end tools and utilities for populating ...

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