A Data Warehouse (DW) provides the secure, consolidated, and integrated information repository necessary for effect information reporting. It brings together the right information across organisational boundaries to ensure there is a ‘single version of the truth’ and trusted information is available at the right time to support effective business intelligence. A significant challenge when designing this type of environment is to ensure that it is flexible and responsive to change.
A data warehouse is not necessarily a single database, we think more in terms of a managed environment that supports both large scale enterprise data warehouse repositories and smaller focused data marts required for specific types of analysis such as data mining, and departmental reporting.
Acuma has extensive experience of building data warehouse solutions using all of the leading database toolsets.
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Acuma has developed, as an integral component of Acuma IVM, a data warehouse development and deployment methodology. This incorporates an iterative design and development approach which has proven to be a very successful.
This approach recognises two key characteristics of data warehouse projects that otherwise tend to cause major risk:
- Firstly, the data used to populate the data warehouse tends to be of highly variable quality. Whilst a lot can be done to resolve quality issues in advance, new issues inevitably emerge during development
- Secondly, users often find it difficult to precisely define requirements prior to working with prototype output.
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