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what does data warehousing mean?

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by aaron

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In lamens terms-what does data warehousing mean? What is a brief description of what you might have to do in that sort of job??

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by t. e. walker

Data warehousing is exactly what it sounds like - one company is putting data in a "warehouse" at another company. Its a lot like renting a storage room, except the company is renting a database - either entire or space in one. This said, there are a lot of levels of detail and useability after that. The data must be accessable, which might be done via a third-party app or custom software written by the Warehousing company. The data might be added to by sending huge data files to the warehousing company, or via say an Internet input form. As you can see, there are lots of variables. Your second question is harder, because Data Warehousing is not a job, its a service. To work in Data Warehousing you should have some dB skills - SQL or Oracle ot whathaveyou, and whatever software is used to manage the data.

by carlos nunes

I disagree with the previous comment. Although T.E. Rutter's comments regarding the outsourcing of the warehouse, as a remote repository for a company's data, may actually be the case for some organizations, it does not correctly describe what a data warehouse is. The classic textbook description from William H. Inmon in Building the Data Warehouse (QED Technical Publishing Group, 1992, ISBN: 0-89435404-3) defines a data warehouse as "a collection of integrated, subject-oriented databases designed to supply the information required for decision-making". If you don't have a brain-freeze yet, the idea is that data are extracted from a business' various source systems into a single, integrated database. The data within this single databaseis organized by business subjects, allowing the database model to be better aligned with the way a decision-making business user would want to query the data. The data warehouse is designed as a tactical and strategic decision making system and is not intended to be used as a transactional system.
As for work in the field, there are a variety of jobs, as is the case in most database projects, but here are three of the most essential. The first is Project Management, few large scale development function without formal project management. The second is data architecture which requires good DB skills for a well-designed and efficient database. The third is Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) development which can at time require the writing of procedural code but often makes use of third party business tools to move the data from the various source systems to the data warehouse. The fourth is developing end-user views of the data. Any programming tools can be used but a trend exists tomake use of packaged OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) tools for advanced data querying and data visualization.

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