Data Warehousing

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  A database is a collection of data or information. Databases are
typically accessed electronically and are used to support Online
Transaction Processing (OLTP). Database Management
Systems (DBMS) store data in the database and enable users and
applications to interact with the data. The term “database” is
commonly used to reference both the database itself as well as the
DBMS.
 Relational databases: Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and
PostgreSQL
 Document databases: MongoDB and CouchDB
 Key-value databases: Redis and DynamoDB
 Wide-column stores: Cassandra and HBase
 Graph databases: Neo4j and Amazon Neptune

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  A data warehouse is a system that stores highly structured
information from various sources. Data warehouses typically store
current and historical data from one or more systems. The goal of
using a data warehouse is to combine disparate data sources in
order to analyze the data, look for insights, and create business
intelligence (BI) in the form of reports and dashboards.
 You might be wondering, "Is a data warehouse a database?" Yes,
a data warehouse is a giant database that is optimized for
analytics.
 Examples of data warehouses include:
 Amazon Redshift.
 Google BigQuery.
 IBM Db2 Warehouse.
 Microsoft Azure Synapse.
 Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.
 Snowflake.
 Teradata Vantage.
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  A data lake stores current and historical data
from one or more systems in its raw form,
which allows business analysts and data
scientists to easily analyze the data.
 AWS S3
 Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
 Google Cloud Storage

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 What is Data Warehouse?

 Defined in many different ways, but not rigorously.

 A decision support database that is maintained
separately from the organization’s operational
database
 Supports information processing by providing a solid
platform of consolidated, historical data for analysis.
 “A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated,
time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of data in support
of management’s decision-making process.”—W. H.
Inmon
 Data warehousing:
 The process of constructing and using data
warehouses
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 Data Warehouse—Subject-Oriented

 Organized around major subjects, such as customer,

product, sales.
 Focusing on the modeling and analysis of data for
decision makers, not on daily operations or transaction
processing.
 Provide a simple and concise view around particular
subject issues by excluding data that are not useful in
the decision support process.

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 Data Warehouse—Integrated
 Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous
data sources
 relational databases, flat files, on-line transaction
records
 Data cleaning and data integration techniques are
applied.
 Ensure consistency in naming conventions, encoding
structures, attribute measures, etc. among different
data sources
 E.g., Hotel price: currency, tax, breakfast covered, etc.
 When data is moved to the warehouse, it is
converted.

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 Data Warehouse—Time Variant

 The time horizon for the data warehouse is significantly

longer than that of operational systems.
 Operational database: current value data.
 Data warehouse data: provide information from a
historical perspective (e.g., past 5-10 years)
 Every key structure in the data warehouse
 Contains an element of time, explicitly or implicitly
 But the key of operational data may or may not
contain “time element”.

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 Data Warehouse—Non-Volatile

 A physically separate store of data transformed from the

operational environment.
 Operational update of data does not occur in the data
warehouse environment.
 Does not require transaction processing, recovery,
and concurrency control mechanisms
 Requires only two operations in data accessing:
 initial loading of data and access of data.

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 Data Warehouse vs. Heterogeneous DBMS

 Traditional heterogeneous DB integration:

 Build wrappers/mediators on top of heterogeneous databases
 Query driven approach
 When a query is posed to a client site, a meta-dictionary is
used to translate the query into queries appropriate for
individual heterogeneous sites involved, and the results are
integrated into a global answer set
 Data warehouse: update-driven, high performance
 Information from heterogeneous sources is integrated in advance
and stored in warehouses for direct query and analysis

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 Data Warehouse vs. Operational DBMS
 OLTP (on-line transaction processing)
 Major task of traditional relational DBMS
 Day-to-day operations: purchasing, inventory, banking,
manufacturing, payroll, registration, accounting, etc.
 OLAP (on-line analytical processing)
 Major task of data warehouse system
 Data analysis and decision making
 Distinct features (OLTP vs. OLAP):
 User and system orientation: customer vs. market
 Data contents: current, detailed vs. historical, consolidated
 Database design: ER + application vs. star + subject
 View: current, local vs. evolutionary, integrated
 Access patterns: update vs. read-only but complex queries
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 OLTP vs. OLAP
OLTP OLAP
users clerk, IT professional knowledge worker
function day to day operations decision support
DB design application-oriented subject-oriented
data current, up-to-date historical,
detailed, flat relational summarized, multidimensional
isolated integrated, consolidated
usage repetitive ad-hoc
access read/write lots of scans
index/hash on prim. key
unit of work short, simple transaction complex query
# records accessed tens millions
#users thousands hundreds
DB size 100MB-GB 100GB-TB
metric transaction throughput query throughput, response

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 Why Separate Data Warehouse?
 High performance for both systems
 DBMS— tuned for OLTP: access methods, indexing,
concurrency control, recovery
 Warehouse—tuned for OLAP: complex OLAP queries,
multidimensional view, consolidation.
 Different functions and different data:
 missing data: Decision support requires historical data
which operational DBs do not typically maintain
 data consolidation: DW requires consolidation
(aggregation, summarization) of data from
heterogeneous sources
 data quality: different sources typically use
inconsistent data representations, codes and formats
which have to be reconciled
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 Conceptual Modeling of
Data Warehouses
 Modeling data warehouses: dimensions & measures
 Star schema: A fact table in the middle connected to a
set of dimension tables
 Snowflake schema: A refinement of star schema
where some dimensional hierarchy is normalized into a
set of smaller dimension tables, forming a shape
similar to snowflake
 Fact constellations: Multiple fact tables share
dimension tables, viewed as a collection of stars,
therefore called galaxy schema or fact constellation
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 Example of Star Schema
time
time_key item
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name
month brand
quarter time_key type
year supplier_type
item_key
branch_key
branch location
location_key
branch_key location_key
branch_name units_sold street
branch_type city
dollars_sold province_or_street
country
avg_sales
Measures

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 Example of Snowflake Schema
time
time_key item
day item_key supplier
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name supplier_key
month brand supplier_type
quarter time_key type
year item_key supplier_key

branch_key
branch location
location_key
location_key
branch_key
units_sold street
branch_name
city_key city
branch_type
dollars_sold
city_key
avg_sales city
province_or_street
Measures country

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 Example of Fact Constellation
time
time_key item Shipping Fact Table
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name time_key
month brand
quarter time_key type item_key
year supplier_type shipper_key
item_key
branch_key from_location

branch location_key location to_location

branch_key location_key dollars_cost
branch_name
units_sold
street
branch_type dollars_sold city units_shipped
province_or_street
avg_sales country shipper
Measures shipper_key
shipper_name
location_key
March 14, 2023 shipper_type 17
 A Concept Hierarchy: Dimension (location)

all all

region Europe ... North_America

country Germany ... Spain Canada ... Mexico

city Frankfurt ... Vancouver ... Toronto

office L. Chan ... M. Wind

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 From Tables and Spreadsheets
to Data Cubes

 A data warehouse is based on a multidimensional data model which

views data in the form of a data cube
 A data cube, such as sales, allows data to be modeled and viewed
in multiple dimensions
 Dimension tables, such as item (item_name, brand, type), or
time(day, week, month, quarter, year)
 Fact table contains measures (such as dollars_sold) and keys to
each of the related dimension tables
 In data warehousing literature, an n-D base cube is called a base
cuboid. The top most 0-D cuboid, which holds the highest-level of
summarization, is called the apex cuboid. The lattice of cuboids
forms a data cube.
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 Multidimensional Data
 Sales volume as a function of product, month,
and region
Dimensions: Product, Location, Time
Hierarchical summarization paths

Industry Region Year

Category Country Quarter

Product

Product City Month Week

Office Day

Month
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 A Sample Data Cube
Total annual sales
Date of TV in U.S.A.
1Qtr 2Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum
TV
PC U.S.A
VCR

Country
sum
Canada

Mexico

sum

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 Cuboids Corresponding to the Cube

all
0-D(apex) cuboid
product date country
1-D cuboids

product,date product,country date, country

2-D cuboids

3-D(base) cuboid
product, date, country

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 Typical OLAP Operations

 Roll up (drill-up): summarize data

 by climbing up hierarchy or by dimension reduction
 Drill down (roll down): reverse of roll-up
 from higher level summary to lower level summary or detailed
data, or introducing new dimensions
 Slice and dice:
 project and select
 Pivot (rotate):
 aggregation on selected dimensions.
 Other operations
 drill across: involving (across) more than one fact table
 drill through: through the bottom level of the cube to its back-
end relational tables (using SQL)
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 Multi-Tiered Architecture

Monitor
& OLAP Server
other Metadata
sources Integrator

Analysis
Operational Extract Query
Transform Data Serve Reports
DBs
Load
Refresh
Warehouse Data mining

Data Marts

Data Sources Data Storage OLAP Engine Front-End Tools

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 Three Data Warehouse Models
 Enterprise warehouse
 collects all of the information about subjects spanning

the entire organization

 Data Mart
 a subset of corporate-wide data that is of value to a

specific groups of users. Its scope is confined to

specific, selected groups, such as marketing data mart
 Independent vs. dependent (directly from warehouse) data mart
 Virtual warehouse
 A set of views over operational databases

 Only some of the possible summary views may be

materialized
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 OLAP Server Architectures
 Relational OLAP (ROLAP)
 Use relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage

warehouse data and OLAP middle ware to support missing pieces

 Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of

aggregation navigation logic, and additional tools and services

 Greater scalability

 Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)

 Array-based multidimensional storage engine (sparse matrix

techniques)
 Fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data

 Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP)

 User flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array

 Specialized SQL servers

 Specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas

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