What Data Warehousing Is Not

Much confusion exists in the literature and among practitioners because many terms are regularly conflated with data warehousing, even now when the maturity of the field should preclude this. A charitable view is that this was at least understandable in the past when the field was evolving rapidly in theory, practice, and product. But today, there ought to be more clarity, precision, and common understanding. In furtherance of this, we feel it is worth asserting that there are worthwhile distinctions still represented by certain overused and misused terms. This section provides a brief summary of some of these terms.

OLAP

The term online analytical processing, or OLAP, was coined by Dr. E. F. Codd (the originator of ...

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