Data Warehouse

What is Data warehouse?

is a long term storage of data, which is ready for business analysis(BI).

Actually, data warehousing is the basic of Business Analysis, since it has done the low level tasks such as data storing, managing, organizing and maintaining. The data in the data warehouse is ready to use in business Analysis and get meaningful trends to improve the business.

Basically, data warehouse is like a warehouse that stores all the enterprise data systematically so that it is easier in retrieval. Data warehouse is different from the databases used for regular daily transactions of a business process. It is at the enterprise level that integrates data from different data sources: can be structured databases of different applications, or unstructured like social media sources. Data warehouses handles a huge amount of data from long term while regular application databases clears in every 6 months or 2 years.

Data warehouses are used for analysis purpose, so the structure and design is very important in maintaining the large amount of data.

Indexing in Data Warehouse

Indexing is almost a must in regular app databases because of its ability to improve the performance of the system. However, in Data Warehousing, whether we should use indexing or not and when to use are very difficult and dubious questions. Unlike the day-to-day recording databases, regular update is not necessary, joining is not required. In such cases, indexing can hinder the process because of loading the unnecessary indexing process to a large amount of data. So it depends on the business requirement where to use indexing and where not. Therefore, heavily indexing like in application databases is something to avoid in data warehousing.

Generally, Data warehouses are structured in relational design.