ICS 2408 - Lecture 3 and 4 - Data Warehouse and OLAP

Data Warehousing and OLAP Technology
 What is a data warehouse?
 A multi-dimensional data model
 Data warehouse implementation
February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 1

What is a Data Warehouse?
 Defined in many different ways, but not rigorously.
 A decision support database that is maintained separately from the
organization’s operational database
 Support information processing by providing a solid platform of consolidated,
historical data for analysis.
 “A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and
nonvolatile collection of data in support of management’s decision-making
process.”—W. H. Inmon
 Data warehousing:
 The process of constructing and using data warehouses
Data Warehouse—Subject-Oriented
 Organized around major subjects, such as customer,

product, sales
 Focusing on the modeling and analysis of data for decision
makers, not on daily operations or transaction processing
 Provide a simple and concise view around particular subject
issues by excluding data that are not useful in the decision
support process

Data Warehouse—Integrated
 Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous

data sources
 relational databases, flat files, on-line transaction records
 Data cleaning and data integration techniques are
applied.
 Ensure consistency in naming conventions, encoding
structures, attribute measures, etc. among different data
sources
 E.g., Hotel price: currency, tax, breakfast covered, etc.
 When data is moved to the warehouse, it is converted.

Data Warehouse—Time Variant
 The time horizon for the data warehouse is significantly

longer than that of operational systems
 Operational database: current value data
 Data warehouse data: provide information from a historical
perspective (e.g., past 5-10 years)
 Every key structure in the data warehouse
 Contains an element of time, explicitly or implicitly
 But the key of operational data may or may not contain “time
element”

Data Warehouse—Nonvolatile
 A physically separate store of data transformed from the

operational environment
 Operational update of data does not occur in the data
warehouse environment
 Does not require transaction processing, recovery, and
concurrency control mechanisms
 Requires only two operations in data accessing:
 initial loading of data and access of data

Data Warehouse vs. Heterogeneous DBMS
 Traditional heterogeneous DB integration: A query driven approach
 Build wrappers/mediators on top of heterogeneous databases
 When a query is posed to a client site, a meta-dictionary is used to translate
the query into queries appropriate for individual heterogeneous sites
involved, and the results are integrated into a global answer set
 Complex information filtering, compete for resources
 Data warehouse: update-driven, high performance

 Information from heterogeneous sources is integrated in advance and stored
in warehouses for direct query and analysis
Data Warehouse vs. Operational DBMS
 OLTP (on-line transaction processing)
 Major task of traditional relational DBMS
 Day-to-day operations: purchasing, inventory, banking,
manufacturing, payroll, registration, accounting, etc.
 OLAP (on-line analytical processing)

 Major task of data warehouse system
 Data analysis and decision making

OLTP vs. OLAP
OLTP OLAP
users clerk, IT professional knowledge worker
function day to day operations decision support
DB design application-oriented subject-oriented
data current, up-to-date historical,
detailed, flat relational summarized, multidimensional
isolated integrated, consolidated
usage repetitive ad-hoc
access read/write lots of scans
index/hash on prim. key
unit of work short, simple transaction complex query
# records accessed tens millions
#users thousands hundreds
DB size 100MB-GB 100GB-TB
metric transaction throughput query throughput, response

Why Separate Data Warehouse?
 High performance for both systems
 DBMS— tuned for OLTP: access methods, indexing, concurrency control,
recovery
 Warehouse—tuned for OLAP: complex OLAP queries, multidimensional view,
consolidation
 Different functions and different data:
 missing data: Decision support (DS) requires historical data which
operational DBs do not typically maintain
 data consolidation: DS requires consolidation (aggregation, summarization)
of data from heterogeneous sources
 data quality: different sources typically use inconsistent data
representations, codes and formats which have to be reconciled

Multidimensional data model
 A data warehouse is based on a multidimensional data model which
views data in the form of a data cube
 A data cube, such as sales, allows data to be modeled and viewed in
multiple dimensions
 Dimension tables, such as item (item_name, brand, type) or time(day, week,
month, quarter, year)
 Fact table contains measures (such as shillings_sold) and keys to each of the
related dimension table.
 A n-D base cube is called a base cuboid. The top most 0-D cuboid, which
holds the highest-level of summarization, is called the apex cuboid.

Multidimensional Data
 Sales volume as a function of product, month, and region

Dimensions: Product, Location, Time
n
Hierarchical summarization paths

o
gi
Re
Industry Region Year
Category Country Quarter

Product
Product City Month Week
Office Day
Month
A Sample Data Cube
Date Total annual sales

1Qtr 2Qtr 3Qtr 4Qtr sum of TV in Kenya
ct
TV
du
PC Kenya
o
Pr
VCR
Country
sum
India
U.K
sum

Cuboids Corresponding to the Cube
All 0-D(apex) cuboid
1-D cuboids
product date country
product, date product, country date, country 2-D cuboids
product, date, country 3-D(base) cuboid

Multidimensional modeling: Schema Design
 Database organization
 must look like business
 must be recognizable by business user
 approachable by business user
 Must be simple
 Schema Types
 Star Schema
 Fact Constellation Schema
 Snowflake schema

Dimension Tables
 Dimension tables
 Define business in terms already familiar to users
 Wide rows with lots of descriptive text
 Small tables (about a million rows)
 Joined to fact table by a foreign key
 heavily indexed
 typical dimensions
 time periods, geographic region (markets, cities),

products, customers, salesperson, etc.

Fact Table
 Central table
 mostly raw numeric items
 narrow rows, a few columns at most
 large number of rows (millions to a billion)
 Access via dimensions

Conceptual Modeling of Data Warehouses
 Star schema: A single fact table in the middle and for each dimension
one dimension table.
Does not capture hierarchies directly
 Snowflake schema: A refinement of star schema where some
dimensional hierarchy is normalized into a set of smaller dimension
tables, forming a shape similar to snowflake.
Easy to maintain and saves storage
 Fact constellations: Multiple fact tables share dimension tables, viewed
as a collection of stars, therefore called galaxy schema or fact
constellation
Example of Star Schema
time
time_key item
day item_key
day_of_the_week Sales Fact Table item_name
month brand
quarter time_key type
year item_key supplier_type
branch_key
branch location_key location
branch_key location_key
units_sold
branch_name street
branch_type dollars_sold city
state_or_province
avg_sales
country
Measures
Example of Snowflake Schema
time
time_key item
day item_key
day_of_the_week
supplier
Sales Fact Table item_name supplier_key
month brand
time_key supplier_type
quarter type
year item_key supplier_type
branch_key
branch_key location_key
units_sold
branch_name street
dollars_sold city city
branch_type
city_key
avg_sales city
state_or_province
Measures country

Example of Fact Constellation
time Shipping Fact Table

time_key item
day time_key
day_of_the_week item_key
Sales Fact Table item_key
month item_name
brand shipper_key
quarter time_key
year type from_location
item_key supplier_type
to_location
branch_key
dollars_cost
units_shipped
branch_key units_sold location_key
branch_name street
branch_type dollars_sold shipper
city
avg_sales province_or_state shipper_key
country shipper_name
Measures location_key
shipper_type
Data warehouse Architecture
 Architecture properties that are essential for a data warehouse

system
 Separation: Analytical and transactional processing should be kept apart as
much as possible.
 Scalability: Hardware and software architectures should be easy to upgrade as
the data volume, which has to be managed and processed, and the number of
users’ requirements, which have to be met, progressively increase.
 Extensibility: The architecture should be able to host new applications and
technologies without redesigning the whole system.
 Security: Monitoring accesses is essential because of the strategic data stored
in data warehouses.
 Administerability: Data warehouse management should not be overly difficult.

Architecture Classification
 Data and control

Based on how the different layers are employed to create
enterprise-oriented or department-oriented views of data
warehouses.
 Structure-oriented
Depends on the number of layers used by the architecture

Global architecture
 Support all, or a large part of the corporation

 High degree of data access and usage(global) across departments
or lines-of-business
 Designed and constructed based on the needs of the enterprise as a
whole
 Physically centralized or
 Physically distributed throughout the organization
 Managed by IS( note not controlled)
 Enables end users to have more of an enterprise-wide or corporate-
wide view of the data

Global architecture

Independent data mart architecture
 Stand-alone data marts

 Controlled by a particular workgroup, department, or line
of business
 Built solely to meet their needs
 Have minimal impact on IS resources and can result in a
very fast implementation

Independent data mart architecture

Single Layer Architecture
 Its goal is to minimize the amount of data stored

 It removes data redundancies
 Source layer is the only one physically available
 Data ware houses are virtual
Implemented as a multidimensional view of operational
data created by specific middleware, or an intermediate
processing layer
 Weakness: does not separate transactional and
analytical processing

Single Layer Architecture

Two Layer Architecture
 Separation between physically available sources and

data warehouses
 consists of four subsequent data flow stages
 Source layer
 Data staging
 Data warehouse layer
 Analysis

 Data marts are used

 They are important because
 They are used as building blocks while incrementally
developing data warehouses;
 They mark out the information required by a specific
group of users to solve queries;
 They can deliver better performance because they are
smaller than primary data warehouses

Source layer
Operational Data External Data
ETL Tools Data staging
Data Warehouse Data

warehouse
Meta Data layer
Data Marts
Reporting tools What-if analysis Analysis

tools
OLAP tools Data mining tools
Three Layer Architecture
 Reconciled data layer is added

 Materializes operational data obtained after integrating
and cleansing source data
 Hence the data are integrated, consistent, correct,
current, and detailed.
 Sometimes used to create daily report

Three Layer Architecture
Source layer
Operational Data External Data
ETL Tools Data staging

Reconciled Data
Reconciled layer
ETL Tools Meta Data
loading
Data Warehouse
Data
Data Marts warehouse
layer
Reporting tools What-if analysis Analysis

tools
OLAP tools Data mining tools
Design of Data Warehouse: A Business
Analysis Framework
 Four views regarding the design of a data warehouse
 Top-down view
 allows selection of the relevant information necessary for the data
warehouse
 Data source view
 exposes the information being captured, stored, and managed by
operational systems
 Data warehouse view
 consists of fact tables and dimension tables
 Business query view
 sees the perspectives of data in the warehouse from the view of end-user

Data Warehouse Design Process
 Top-down, bottom-up approaches or a combination of both
 Top-down: Starts with overall design and planning (mature)
 Bottom-up: Starts with experiments and prototypes (rapid)
 From software engineering point of view
 Waterfall: structured and systematic analysis at each step before proceeding to
the next
 Spiral: rapid generation of increasingly functional systems, short turn around
time, quick turn around
 Typical data warehouse design process
 Choose a business process to model, e.g., orders, invoices, etc.
 Choose the grain (atomic level of data) of the business process
 Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record
 Choose the measure that will populate each fact table record
Data Warehouse Models
 Enterprise warehouse
 collects all of the information about subjects spanning the entire
organization
 Data Mart
 a subset of corporate-wide data that is of value to a specific
groups of users. Its scope is confined to specific, selected

groups, such as marketing data mart
 Independent vs. dependent (directly from warehouse) data mart
 Virtual warehouse
 A set of views over operational databases
 Only some of the possible summary views may be materialized

Data Warehouse Back-End Tools and Utilities
 Data extraction
 get data from multiple, heterogeneous, and external sources
 Data cleaning
 detect errors in the data and rectify them when possible
 Data transformation
 convert data from legacy or host format to warehouse format
 Load
 sort, summarize, consolidate, compute views, check integrity,
and build indicies and partitions

 Refresh
 propagate the updates from the data sources to the warehouse

Metadata Repository
 Meta data is the data defining warehouse objects. It stores:

 Description of the structure of the data warehouse
 schema, view, dimensions, hierarchies, derived data definitions, data mart locations
and contents
 Operational meta-data
 data lineage (history of migrated data and transformation path), currency of data
(active, archived, or purged), monitoring information (warehouse usage statistics,
error reports, audit trails)
 The algorithms used for summarization
 The mapping from operational environment to the data warehouse
 Data related to system performance
 warehouse schema, view and derived data definitions
 Business data: business terms and definitions, ownership of data, charging policies

OLAP Server Architectures
 Relational OLAP (ROLAP)

 Use relational or extended-relational DBMS to store and manage warehouse data
and OLAP middle ware
 Include optimization of DBMS backend, implementation of aggregation navigation
logic, and additional tools and services
 Greater scalability
 Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP)
 Sparse array-based multidimensional storage engine
 Fast indexing to pre-computed summarized data
 Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) (e.g., Microsoft SQLServer)
 Flexibility, e.g., low level: relational, high-level: array
 Specialized SQL servers (e.g., Redbricks)
 Specialized support for SQL queries over star/snowflake schemas
Typical OLAP Operations
 Roll up (drill-up): summarize data

 by climbing up hierarchy or by dimension reduction
 Drill down (roll down): reverse of roll-up
 from higher level summary to lower level summary or detailed data, or introducing
new dimensions
 Slice and dice:
 project and select
 Pivot (rotate):
 reorient the cube, visualization, 3D to series of 2D planes.
 Other operations
 drill across: involving (across) more than one fact table
 drill through: through the bottom level of the cube to its back-end relational tables
(using SQL)
A Visual Operation: Pivot (Rotate)
NY
LA nth
Mo
SF
10
Juice
47
Region
Cola
Milk 30
Cream 12 Product
3/1 3/2 3/3 3/4
Date
42
“Slicing and Dicing”
The Telecomm Slice

Product
Household
Telecomm n s
gio
e
R Europe
Video
Far East
Audio India
Retail Direct Special Sales Channel
43
Roll-up and Drill Down
Higher Level of
Aggregation
 Sales Channel
Region
Drill-Down

 Country
Roll Up
 State
 Location Address
 Sales Representative
Low-level
Details
44
Data Warehouse Usage
 Three kinds of data warehouse applications

 Information processing
 supports querying, basic statistical analysis, and reporting using crosstabs,
tables, charts and graphs
 Analytical processing
 multidimensional analysis of data warehouse data
 supports basic OLAP operations, slice-dice, drilling, pivoting
 Data mining
 knowledge discovery from hidden patterns
 supports associations, constructing analytical models, performing classification
and prediction, and presenting the mining results using visualization tools

Properties characterizing data quality
 Accuracy - Stored values should be compliant with real-world ones.

 Freshness - Data should not be old.
 Completeness - There should be no lack of information.
 Consistency - Data representation should be uniform.
 Availability - Users should have easy access to data.
 Traceability - Data can easily be traced back to its sources.
 Clearness - Data can be easily understood.

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Data Warehousing and OLAP Technology

 What is a data warehouse?

 A multi-dimensional data model

 Data warehouse implementation

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 1

 Organized around major subjects, such as customer,

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 3

 Constructed by integrating multiple, heterogeneous

 When data is moved to the warehouse, it is converted.

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 4

 The time horizon for the data warehouse is significantly

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 5

 A physically separate store of data transformed from the

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 6

 Data warehouse: update-driven, high performance

 OLAP (on-line analytical processing)

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 8

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 9

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 10

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 11

 Sales volume as a function of product, month, and region

Hierarchical summarization paths

Industry Region Year

Category Country Quarter

Product City Month Week

Date Total annual sales

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 13

All 0-D(apex) cuboid

product, date product, country date, country 2-D cuboids

product, date, country 3-D(base) cuboid

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 14

 must be recognizable by business user

 approachable by business user

 Fact Constellation Schema

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 15

 Wide rows with lots of descriptive text

 Small tables (about a million rows)

 Joined to fact table by a foreign key

 time periods, geographic region (markets, cities),

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 16

 narrow rows, a few columns at most

 large number of rows (millions to a billion)

 Access via dimensions

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 17

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 20

time Shipping Fact Table

 Architecture properties that are essential for a data warehouse

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 22

 Data and control

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 23

 Support all, or a large part of the corporation

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 24

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 25

 Stand-alone data marts

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 26

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 27

 Its goal is to minimize the amount of data stored

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 28

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 29

 Separation between physically available sources and

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 30

 Data marts are used

February 19, 2024 Moso J : Dedan Kimathi University 31