Data Management - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 180

Data
Warehouse

Vendors Customers

Data Mart Data Mart

Clients

Data Mart

FIGURE 6.2
Data warehouse and its associated data marts.

A data warehouse is a record of an enterprise's past transactional and
operational information, stored in a database designed for efficient data
analysis and reporting (especially OLAP). Two basic ideas guide the cre-
ation of a data warehouse:

1. Integration of data from distributed and differently structured
databases, which facilitates a global overview and comprehen-
sive analysis in the data warehouse. Periodically, one imports
data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other
related business software systems into the data warehouse for fur-
ther processing.

2. Separation of data used in daily operations from data used in the
data warehouse for purposes of reporting, decision support, analy-
sis, and controlling.

Operational Data Store

The Operational Data Store (ODS) is a database that consolidates data
from multiple source systems and provides a near real-time, integrated
view of volatile, current data. An ODS differs from a warehouse in that
the ODS's contents are updated in the course of business, whereas a data
warehouse contains static data.