Data Warehousing

http://www.dwinfocenter.org/

Data warehouses are collections of data designed to support management decision making that sometimes serve as repositories of organizational knowledge. I found this great website that contains a wealth of information on data warehousing. The site's "aim is to give you a taste of the good and (unlike most web sites) the bad in data warehousing and business intelligence." The site is a collection of essays that define data warehousing, give the pros and cons, and provide various other relevant information for anyone who is interested in the subject. An example of the other information is the section on what actions to take for successful data warehousing. For instance, establishing from the beginning that maintaining data quality will be an ongoing joint user/builder responsibility and training users one at a time are both actions that will assist in implementing a succesful data warehouse. Possible errors that users may come across are also available. These errors include data that may be incomplete, incorrect, incomprehensible, or inconsistent. The data that is contained in a data warehouse represents a large part of a company's knowledge. Companies need to have proper processes for gathering and storing information and data warehouses can be used for that purpose.