Types of data and their uses

Business data: that data which is related to business perspective , in

order to survive & succeed in todays highly competitive global
environment, buiness users demand buiness answers mainly because.
- decisions need to be made quickely and correctly
and all the data available to it.
- Users are business domain experts , not computer professionals, all
that data which is related to them.
The amount of data doubles every 18 month, which affects response time
& the sheer ability to comprehend its content.
Competition is heading un the areas of buiness intelligence and added
information value.

External data : we can also use data warehouse if user required more
then one data mart. This will avoid redundancy and duplicacy in
procurement of external data when a particular external data is required
its ‘pedigree’ or descriptive details in addition to data are also required to
be stored. These details include the source of the external data, size and
data of acquisition of the external data editing and filtering criteria
applied to the external data etc.

Refrence data: the reference data labels , stored in addition to basic

data in a data warehouse help and enable the end user of the data
warehouse to relate the data to a expansion version. The reference data
typically copied over from the data warehouse, although it is rarely
possible that the data warehouse itself will and manage its own refrence
tables when refrence tables are stored and managed in DSS environment
is a complex task which may be best done by the data warehouse itself.
Data mart: data mart is a body of DSS data for a department that has an
architectural foundation of data warehouse.
Data mart is a subset of data warehouse.
From a data warehouse, data flows to various departments for their
customized DSS usage. These individual departments components are
called data marts.

Types of data mart:

MDDB OLAP or MOLAP- in a MDDB data mart, the numeric data,
which is basically multidimensional in its original nature can be sliced &
diced in a free fashion. E.g free from constraints.

ROLAP(relational data mart)- it contains both numeric and text and are
supported by RDBMS.

Types of contextual information

First we can have simple contextual information that describe basic
structure of data warehouse. Eg. Size, growth rate of encoding used for
data and naming common used for data.

Second is complex contextual information that describes the same data as

simple contextual but form a nmarket prospects
Such as product definition, market territories, pricing and organising
structures.

Third is external contextual information the data outside the corporation.

Uses of meta data:

Meta data refers to the information the data stored inside the data
warehouse to end users.

METADATA
1. summarized data inside data warehouse.
2. detailed data inside data warehouse.
3. end users.

Components of metadata in a data warehouse are:

- Tables structures.
- Tables attributes.
- The system of records used by the data warehouse.
- Data model used in the data warehouse.
- Description of data inside the data warehouse.
- Procedures for access of data inside data warehouse.

Other types of data

Data cubes
Data schemas
Data models
Detailed data
Operational data
Transactional data.