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6.Discuss the relative granularity of data warehouses and online analytic processing systems.

Granularity refers to the level of data detail. Data warehouses tend to focus on data that is close to raw form. It is necessary to clean data, because it should be accurate, complete, and in the power format. Ideally, once data is cleaned, it should be entered into the data warehouse permanently. For decision making, data usually needs to be aggregated. But it is never known beforehand what data is going to be needed. The data warehouse contains the data in its finest level of granularity. Online analytic processing is a multidimensional spreadsheet approach to shared data storage designed to allow users to extract data and generate reports on the dimensions important to them. Data is segregated into different dimensions and organized in a hierarchical manner. There are many variants and extensions generated by the OLAP vendor industry. A typical procedure is for OLAP products to take data from relational databases and store them in multidimensional form, often called a hypercube, to reflect the OLAP ability to access data on these multiple dimensions. Data can be analyzed locally with this structure. 7.Data in data warehouses should be normalized, formatted, and stable. What does this mean? Data warehouse are normalized into relational form. This means that the data is organized into a series of tables connected by keys. Thus, you may not find a complete flat file with all information relating to articular transaction. 8.What functions does online analytic processing support? One function of OLAP is standard report generation, including financial performance analysis on selected dimensions( such as by department, geographical region, product, salesperson, time, or other dimensions desired by te analyst). Planning and forecasting are supported through spreadsheet analytic tools. Budgeting calculations can be included through spreadsheet tools as well. An OLAP product is part of a system including a data warehouse, an OLAP server, and a client server, often on a local area network. Client users are connected. OLAP functioning requires multidimensional data views, the ability to conduct calculationintensive operations, and time intelligence. The multidimensional capability gives managers the ability to look at the data form a number of different perspectives

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