A data warehouse (DW) is a database used for reporting. The data is offloaded from the operational systems for reporting. The components of data warehouse are data sources, data transformation, reporting, metadata, operations, and operational components.
In short, data is moved from databases used in operational systems into a data warehouse staging area, then into a data warehouse and finally into a set of conformed data marts. Data is copied from one database to another using a technology called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load).
Sourcing, Acquisition, Cleanup and Transformation Tools:
The functionality includes:
- Removing unwanted data from operational databases
- Converting to common data names and definitions
- Establishing defaults for missing data
- Accommodating source data definition changes
Meta data:
Meta data is data about data that describes the data warehouse. It is used for building, maintaining, managing and using the data warehouse.
