Glossary - A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing - page 423

Data governance The practice of organizing and implementing policies, pro-
cedures, and standards for the effective use of an organization's structured
or unstructured information assets.

Data mart A collection of data that is organized for end user ease of use and
performance. The term is typically used to describe all of the data that is
loaded into a single database and used together for analysis. Data marts are
often developed to meet the needs of a business group such as marketing or
finance. The key to successful data marts is to create them in an integrated
manner using conformed dimensions (explained in Chapter 7). It is also
recommended that data be loaded into only one data mart and then shared
across the organization to ensure data consistency.

Data model An abstraction of how individual data elements relate to each
other. It visually depicts how the data is to be organized and stored
in a database. A data model provides the mechanism to document and
understand how data is organized.

Data quality Assessment of the cleanliness, accuracy, and reliability of data.

Data warehouse For the purposes of this topic, a data warehouse is the
collection of data and processes that gather data from across the organization,
organize it for access, and deliver reports and analyses to the business
community. Other well-known definitions of a data warehouse in the
industry that are worth mentioning include the following:

(1) The complete end-to-end data warehouse and business intelligence
system (DW/BI system). Although some would argue that you can theo-
retically deliver business intelligence without a data warehouse and vice
versa, that is ill-advised from our perspective. Linking the two together
in the DW/BI acronym reinforces their dependency. Independently, we
refer to the queryable data in your DW/BI system as the enterprise data
warehouse, and value-add analytics as BI (business intelligence) applica-
tions. (From The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, Second Edition ,byRalph
Kimball et al., John Wiley and Sons, 2008, pg. 602.)
(2) The data warehouse is a collection of integrated subject-oriented data
bases designed to support the DSS (decision support system) function,
where each unit of data is relevant to some moment in time. The data
warehouse contains atomic data and lightly summarized data. (From
Building the Data Warehouse, Fourth Edition , by Bill Inmon and Claudia
Imhoff, John Wiley and Sons, 2005, pg. 495.)