CHAPTER 8 : ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION - DATA WAREHOUSE

Data warehouse fundamentals

-Data warehouse - a logical collection of information-gathered from many different operational database- that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks.

-Primary purpose - to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository in such way that employees can make decisions and undertake business analysis activities.

-Extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external database, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.

-Data warehouse- then send subsets of the information to data mart.

-Data mart - contain the subsets of data warehouse information.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING
cube- the common term for the representation of multi dimensional databases.

data mining - process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone.
data-mining tools - variety of techniques to find patterns and relationship in large volumes of information and infer rules from them that predict future behaviour decision making.

INFORMATION CLEANSING AND SCRUBBING

                                                -contact information in operational system

                                           -standardizing customer name from operational systems

                                                         -information cleansing activities

                                                       -accurate and complete information


BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

-application and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts.specifically :-

• collecting information.
• discerning patterns and meaning in the information.
• responding to the resultant information.

CHAPTER 7 : STORING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION-DATABASES

Database - maintains information about various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people (employees), and places (warehouses).
Hierarchical database model - information is organized into a tree-like structure that allows repeating information using parent/child relationships in such a way that it cannot have too many relationships.
Network database model - is a flexible way of representing objects and their relationships.
Relational database model - type of database that stores information in the form of logically related two-dimensional tables.

This picture below show the hierarchical, network and relational structure :-

ENTITIES AND ATTRIBUTES
entity - the relational database ,model is a person, place, thing model is a person, place, thing, transaction, or event about which information is stored.
attributes - fields or columns, are characteristics or properties of an entity class.

KEYS AND ATTRIBUTES
primary key - group and fields that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table.
foreign key -  the relational database model is a primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship between two tables.

RELATIONAL DATABASE ADVANTAGES
-Increased flexibility
-Increased scalability and performance
-Reduced information redundancy
-Increased information integrity (quality)
-Increased information security

#INCREASED FLEXIBILITY
Databases tend to mirror business structures and a good database can handle changes quickly and easily.
physical view - information deals with the physical storage of information on a storage device such as a hard disc.
logical view - information focuses on how users logically access information to meet their particular business needs.

#INCREASED SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
scalability - how well a system can adapt to increased demands.
performance - how quickly system performs a certain process or transaction.

#REDUCED INFORMATION REDUNDANCY
redundancy - duplication of information, or storing the same information in multiple places.

#INCREASED INFORMATION INTEGRITY (QUALITY)
information integrity - measure of the quality of information.
relational integrity constraints - rules that enforce basic and fundamental information- based constraints.
business-critical integrity constraints - enforce business rules vital to an organization's success an often require more insight and knowledge than relational integrity constraints.

#BUSINESS INFORMATION SECURITY
any asset that the organization must protect its information from unauthorized users or misuse.

DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (DBMS)
-software through which users and application programs interact with a database.

DATA DRIVEN WEBSITE
-interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database.

INTEGRATING INFORMATION AMONG MULTIPLE DATABASES
integration - allows separate systems to communicate directly with each other.
forward integration - takes information entered into a given system and sends it automatically to all downstream systems and processes.
backward integration - takes information entered into a given systems and sends it automatically to all upstream systems and processes.