Features of

Data Warehouse
Subject Oriented Data
• In the data warehouse data is not stored by operational
applications but by business objects.
• A Data warehouse is organized around major subjects such
as customer, products, sales etc.
• Data are organized according to subject instead of
application. For example an insurance company using a
data warehouse would organize their data by customer,
premium, and claim instead of by different products.
Subject Oriented Data

Figure 2-1 Data Warehouse is Subject Oriented

Integrated Data
• Data inconsistencies are removed; data from diverse operational
applications is integrated.
• A data warehouse is usually constructed by integrating multiple;
heterogeneous sources such as relational databases, flat files, and
OLTP files.
Integrated Data

Figure 2-2 Data Warehouse is Integrated

Time-Variant Data
• Data are stored in a data warehouse to provide a historical
perspective.
• Every key structure in the data warehouse contains, implicitly or
explicitly, an element of time.
Nonvolatile Data
• Usually the data in data warehouse is not updated or deleted.
• A data warehouse is always a physically separate store of data,
which is transformed from the application data found in the
appropriate environment.
• Due to this separation, data warehouses do not require transaction
processing, recovery, concurrency control etc. just as we used in
DBMS.
Nonvolatile Data

Figure 2‑1 Data Warehouse is Nonvolatile

Validated
• Data from various sources are validated before storing them in a
data warehouse.
• Data quality is crucial to the credibility of the warehouse
Data Granularity
• Granularity represents the highest level of detail expressed by the
primary data contained in a data warehouse, also referred to as
atomic data.
• Obviously, the granularity of a data warehouse cannot exceed that
of the original data sources.