Data Warehousing

The book I read to research this post was Data Warehousing For Dummies by Thomas C Hammergren which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book was written around 2008 so lacks some of the most recent developments like facebook marketing, cloud computing & microsoft azure to name but a few. It's interesting however as I think some companies and organisations especially with sensitive information might want an onsite solution rather than something like a cloud computing database. Also it has information on vendors of different types of database ie data mining and one of the main players is

http://sas.com

but anyway a lot of the information on vendors is relevent. There is also the option of a data mart a smaller version of a data warehouse which can be for a small company or be to summarize the results. In practice a data warehouse would probably be a server with several workstations connected and programmers and analysts would be working on these. The leading program for data marts is probably SQL Server by Microsoft & the leading players in heavy duty databases are probably IBM & Oracle. Of course a good data warehouse will more than pay back in dividends what the set up costs were. Typically you will store sales information, branch by branch and competitor information and maybe company information like employers etc. Of course the trend is to use relational tables and do crosstab queries to get information. Basically this means using lots of interrelated small tables. I did really enjoy reading this book and learned a lot from it. I would suggest though see what cloud offerings there are before building a data warehouse.