Data warehouse or data warehouse in Portuguese, or data deposit , is an architecture that aims to store information that is organized in the computerized systems of a company or entity, organizing reports through the histories , which facilitate the making of future decisions with based on the data presented.

Meaning of data warehouse

The concept of data warehouse in Portuguese is data warehouse, and aims to keep a history of information collected from internal and external systems of a company. The data warehouse does not create information, but only collects, organizes and creates patterns , correcting errors and restoring data, thus facilitating control and making the steps of a given process more flexible. At the end of processing, reports are created with all the data organized, which serve for analysis of the various areas of the company.

Data warehouse and data mart

The meaning of data mart can be understood as subdivisions of the data warehouse system, that is, each part of the information collected by the tool, regardless of the subject. These parties can be sales, controllership, warehouse, among others.

This information generally belongs to and will be analyzed by a specific sector of the company, as it is directed to only one line of business.

Data warehouse and business intelligence

Business intelligence is the name of the method of analyzing information collected from companies’ information systems. In Portuguese, the meaning of business intelligence is business intelligence, and its main objective is to help these companies to make the best decision based on the data collected.

Most of the work object of business intelligence is the information collected by the data warehouse, however, not all the data collected by the data warehouse are used by business intelligence, since it is not always necessary to carry out a data warehouse to apply the method.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Data Warehousing

There are many advantages to using the data warehouse. Speed, simplicity, data quality, quick access, specific analysis of an area, facilitating decision-making, security, organization of information flow and computational infrastructure are some of them. Likewise, there are some disadvantages such as the high operating cost, the speed with which all data collected is outdated, development time and complexity.

OLAP

It is the most used tool to analyze and present the information collected by the data warehouse. OLAP is capable of analyzing a large amount of data from different perspectives. It is a multifunctional tool, as it can be used by any manager, from any area, thus facilitating decision-making. The functions that most use OLAP are the financial area (cash flow, budgets, accounts, analysis…), the marketing area (market volume, market analysis, competition analysis…), sales (forecasts , clientele, profits…), human resources (salary projection, benefits analysis…) and manufacturing (inventory, list of suppliers, demand planning, cost of raw materials…). OLAP stands for online analytical processing, and is subdivided into five tools: ROLAP, MOLAP, HOLAP, DOLAP, and WOLAP.