Module – 3 Introduction to Data
Warehousing
MODULE 2: Introduction Data Warehouse
Introduction to Data warehouse: Data Warehouse and OLAP
Technology for Data Mining, Data Warehouse and OLAP
Technology for Data Mining, Multidimensional Data Model, Data
Warehouse Architecture, Data Warehouse Implementation, Typical
OLAP operations, Data warehouse design & usage, Data
warehouse implementation
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Introduction to Data Warehouse
1. WHAT IS A DATA WAREHOUSE?
2. A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL DATA MODEL
3. DATA WAREHOUSE ARCHITECTURE
4. FROM DATA WAREHOUSING TO DATA MINING
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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
Support 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—
Nonvolatile
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 Data warehouse: update-driven,
integration: A query driven high performance
approach Information from
Build wrappers/mediators on heterogeneous sources is
top of heterogeneous integrated in advance and
databases stored in warehouses for
A meta-dictionary is used to direct query and analysis
translate the query into
queries and the results are
integrated into a global
answer set
Complex information filtering,
compete for resources
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Heterogeneous
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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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:
historical data: Decision support requires historical data which
operational DBs do not typically maintain
data consolidation: DS 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
Note: There are more and more systems which perform OLAP analysis
directly on relational databases
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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 Model
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Multidimensional
Data Model
2D
view
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Multidimensional
Data Model
3D view
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Multidimensional
Data Model
4D view
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Cube: A Lattice of Cuboids
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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:
Star Schema
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Example:
Snowflake Schema
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Example:
Fact Constellation
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Cube: Three
Categories
Distributive: if the result derived by applying the function to n
aggregate values is the same as that derived by applying the
function on all the data without partitioning
E.g., count(), sum(), min(), max()
Algebraic: if it can be computed by an algebraic function with M
arguments (where M is a bounded integer), each of which is
obtained by applying a distributive aggregate function
E.g., avg(), min_N(), standard_deviation()
Holistic: if there is no constant bound on the storage size
needed to describe a subaggregate.
E.g., median(), mode(), rank()
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Hierarchy:
Dimension (location)
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Warehouses &
Hierarchies
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Warehouses &
Hierarchies
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A Sample Data Cube
Date
1Qtr 2Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum
t
uc
TV
od
PC U.S.A
Pr
VCR
Country
sum
Canada
Mexico
sum
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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):
reorient the cube, visualization, 3D to series of 2D planes
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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Roll Up
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Drill
Down
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Slice
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Dice
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Pivot
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A Star-Net Query
Model
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Warehouse: A Business
Analysis Framework
Four views regarding the design of a data warehouse
Top-down view
allows selection of the relevant information necessary for the data
warehouse
Data source view
exposes the information being captured, stored, and managed by
operational systems
Data warehouse view
consists of fact tables and dimension tables
Business query view
sees the perspectives of data in the warehouse from the view of end-
user
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Data Warehouse
Design Process
Top-down, bottom-up approaches or a combination of both
Top-down: Starts with overall design and planning (mature) - Inmon
Bottom-up: Starts with experiments and prototypes (rapid) - Kimball
From software engineering point of view
Waterfall: structured and systematic analysis at each step before
proceeding to the next
Spiral: rapid generation of increasingly functional systems, short
turn around time, quick turn around
Typical data warehouse design process
Choose a business process to model, e.g., orders, invoices, etc.
Choose the grain (atomic level of data) of the business process
Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record
Choose the measure that will populate each fact table record
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Data Warehouse: A Multi-Tiered Architecture
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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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Development:
A Recommended Approach
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Back-End Tools and
Utilities
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Metadata Repository
Meta data is the data defining warehouse objects. It stores:
Description of the structure of the data warehouse
schema, view, dimensions, hierarchies, derived data defn, data mart
locations and contents
Operational meta-data
data lineage (history of migrated data and transformation path),
currency of data (active, archived, or purged), monitoring
information (warehouse usage statistics, error reports, audit trails)
The algorithms used for summarization
The mapping from operational environment to the data warehouse
Data related to system performance
warehouse schema, view and derived data definitions
Business data
business terms and definitions, ownership of data, charging policies
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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
Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of
aggregation navigation logic, and additional tools and services
Greater scalability
Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)
Sparse array-based multidimensional storage engine
Fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data
Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) (e.g., Microsoft SQLServer)
Flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array
Specialized SQL servers (e.g., Redbricks)
Specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas
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ROLAP Datastore
(Example)
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Data Warehouse
Usage
Three kinds of data warehouse applications
Information processing
supports querying, basic statistical analysis, and reporting
using crosstabs, tables, charts and graphs
Analytical processing
multidimensional analysis of data warehouse data
supports basic OLAP operations, slice-dice, drilling, pivoting
Data mining
knowledge discovery from hidden patterns
supports associations, constructing analytical models,
performing classification and prediction, and presenting the
mining results using visualization tools
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OLAP & OLAM
Why online analytical mining?
High quality of data in data warehouses
DW contains integrated, consistent, cleaned data
Available information processing structure surrounding
data warehouses
ODBC, OLEDB, Web accessing, service facilities,
reporting and OLAP tools
OLAP-based exploratory data analysis
Mining with drilling, dicing, pivoting, etc.
On-line selection of data mining functions
Integration and swapping of multiple mining functions,
algorithms, and tasks
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Integrated OLAM & OLAP
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