Briefly explain the components of a data warehouse
Answers
Data Warehouse Database
The central data warehouse database is the cornerstone of the data warehousing environment. This database is almost always implemented on the relational database management system (RDBMS) technology. However, this kind of implementation is often constrained by the fact that traditional RDBMS products are optimized for transactional database processing. Certain data warehouse attributes, such as very large database size, ad hoc query processing and the need for flexible user view creation including aggregates, multi-table joins and drill-downs, have become drivers for different technological approaches to the data warehouse database. These approaches include:
Parallel relational database designs for scalability that include shared-memory, shared disk, or shared-nothing models implemented on various multiprocessor configurations (symmetric
multiprocessors or SMP, massively parallel processors or MPP, and/or clusters of uni- or multiprocessors).
An innovative approach to speed up a traditional RDBMS by using new index structures to bypass relational table scans.
Multidimensional databases (MDDBs) that are based on proprietary database technology; conversely, a dimensional data model can be implemented using a familiar RDBMS. Multi-dimensional databases are designed to overcome any limitations placed on the warehouse by the nature of the relational data model. MDDBs enable on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools that architecturally belong to a group of data warehousing