Introduction to Data Warehousing and Analysis Services 2005 - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 3

Chapter 1: Introduction to Data Warehousing and
Analysis Services 2005
A data warehouse is a system that takes data from a company's databases
and other data sources and transforms it into a structure conducive to busi-
ness analysis. Mathematical operations are often performed on the newly
structured or organized data to further its usefulness for making business de-
cisions. Finally, the data is made available to the end user for querying and
analysis. If the data warehouse is well architected then queries to the data
warehouse will return query results quickly (in a matter of seconds). The busi-
ness decision-maker will have a powerful tool that could never have been ef-
fectively used directly from the company's daily operational systems. We con-
sider data analysis to be of two forms. The first requires a person to investigate
the data for trends. This method is called On Line Analytical Processing
(OLAP). The second form utilizes algorithms to scour the data looking for
trends. This method is called Data Mining. Analysis Services 2005 is a busi-
ness intelligence platform that enables you to use OLAP and Data Mining.
Now that you have the big picture of data warehousing, let us look at what you
will learn in this chapter.
In this chapter you learn what data warehousing really is and how it relates to
business intelligence. This information comes wrapped in a whole load of new
concepts, and you get a look at the best known approaches to warehousing
with the introduction of those concepts. We explain data warehousing in sever-
al different ways and we are sure you will understand it. You will finally see
how Analysis Services 2005 puts it all together in terms of architecture — at
both client and server levels — based on a new data abstraction layer called
Unified Dimensional Model (UDM).