| Hundreds of major companies around the world use | | | | skew or obfuscate meaning in the reporting and |
| data warehousing solutions to get a single, integrated | | | | analytic outputs of databases, reporting tools, |
| view of their business to enhance decision-making, | | | | dashboards and scorecards. When people talk about |
| customer relationships, and profitability. Given the | | | | an enterprise data warehousing, they certainly |
| prominent role it plays in its customers’ | | | | understand the concept of everyone in the |
| businesses, the reliability and security of its software | | | | enterprise should be able to access all the data in the |
| is truly mission-critical. The need of the hour is a | | | | enterprise. |
| relational database management system that is | | | | When you work within the Data Warehousing arena, |
| linearly and predictably scalable in all dimensions of a | | | | what most people start off with is trying to |
| database system workload (data volume, breadth, | | | | generate reports for their end-user community. This |
| number of users, and complexity of queries), | | | | seems fairly easy if one can take the data, format it |
| explaining its popularity for large enterprise data | | | | and push an answer set to the end-user, to an Excel |
| warehouse applications. | | | | sheet, or to a prepackaged paper packet or a |
| If there is a single pitfall that undermines any given | | | | computer. So, essentially the data is being pushed out |
| data management initiative, it is most likely to be | | | | to where it’s being used. What’s most |
| found in the realm of data quality, which is a | | | | effective is when people can take their questions and |
| requirement for sound decision-making. Whether in | | | | bring them to where the data is. So, rather than |
| combination or by themselves, databases are almost | | | | moving data, processes are being moved. Because |
| certain to contain entry errors, multiple common | | | | moving data costs a lot of money, takes a lot of |
| entries and other redundancies that inevitably lead to | | | | time, adds a level of security breach apart from |
| incorrect or incomplete identifications of customers, | | | | creating confusion. Hence it’s always better to |
| products and locations. Thus, data quality is a critical | | | | bring the data together once, and allow people to |
| prerequisite to any BI initiative that would otherwise | | | | access that data with their processors. |