Database free essay sample

The following major concepts were introduced in this Chapter (Ch 6): 1. 1 Data Warehouse A data warehouse is a database that stores current and historical data of potential interest to decision makers throughout the company. The data originate in many core operational transaction systems, such as systems for sale, customer accounts, and manufacturing, and may include data from Web site transactions. The data warehouse consolidates and standardizes information from different operational databases so that the information can be used across the enterprise for management analysis and decision making. In the Terrorist Watch List Database case, the information about suspected terrorists are consolidated and standardized from multiple government agencies so that the information can be centralized into a single list, from which different agencies can communicate and share information with each other. This centralized database is a specific example of data warehouse. In this case, the data warehouse containing the relevant information of individuals from each agency’s list enhancing effectiveness of communication between agencies as well as increase the consistency of information from separate databases. We will write a custom essay sample on Database or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The data warehouse makes the data available for anyone to access as needed, but it cannot be altered. 1. 2 Data Mining Data mining is more discovery driven. Data mining provides insight into corporate data that cannot be obtained with OLAP by finding hidden patterns and relationships in large databases and inferring rules from them to predict future behaviour. The patterns and rules are used to guide decision making and forecast the effect of those decisions. The types of information obtainable from data mining include associations, sequences, classifications, clusters, and forecasts. 1. 3 Business Intelligence These tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to vast amounts of data to help users make better business decisions are often referred to business intelligence. Principal tools for business intelligence include soft ware for database query and reporting, tools for multidimensional data analysis(OLAP), and data mining. BI process usually provides users the internal relationship of data so that enable users to see the patterns, relationships and insights of the data and make better decisions. In the Terrorist Watch List Database case, according to the standard provided in the data mining of the database, information can be correctly classified multi-dimensional. For instance, the information on the watch list can be distributed to different government agency systems (e. g. FBI, CIA, NSA,TSA) to detect and trace the movement of suspects. What is more, the information received by different agencies is pre-classified so as to fit the specific agency’s mission. The distribution and integration process involves classification of the information as well as multi-dimensional analysis processes. These processes are all referred to Business Intelligence through which end users get consolidated analysis and get access to vast data. 1. 4 Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) OLAP supports multidimensional data analysis, enabling users to view the same data in different ways using multiple dimensions. Each aspect of information- product, pricing, cost, region, or time period represents a different dimension. So, a product manager could use a multidimensional data analysis tool to learn how many washers were sold in the East in June, how that compares with the previous month and the previous June. And how it compares with the sales forecast. OLAP enables users to obtain online answers to ad hoc questions such as these in a fairly rapid amount of time, even when the data are stored in very large databases, such as sales figures for multiple years. . 5 Databases and Database Management Systems A database is a collection of data organized to serve many applications efficiently by centralizing the data and controlling redundant data. Database management systems is software that permits an organization to centralize data, manage them efficiently, and provide access to the stored data by application programs. The DBMS acts as an interface between application programs and the physical da ta files.