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A Report on Data Management

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INDEX
SR.NO Database introduction Need of databases Particulars Page No.

1.

2.

Moving from Database to Data Warehouse

3.

Data Warehouse What is data warehousing? Evolution Benefits of a data ware house Applications of data warehousing

4.

Data marts

10

5.

Data mining Need for data mining Use of data mining services How does data mining work? Data mining technologies The future of data mining

12

6.

Decision support system Types of decision support system models Benefits

18

7.

OLAP Types

22

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Database
A database is a collection of related data and interrelated files. A database management system (DBMS), sometimes just called Database Manager, is a program that lets one or more computer users create and access data in a database. A DBMS is computer software designed for the purpose of managing databases. A database manager organizes a related collection of data so that information can be retrieved easily. Database Manager allows users to store modify and access information from a database. Database managers are used by all kinds of people from teachers to police officers.

Need of databases:
1. Redundancies and Inconsistencies can be reduced: The data in conventional data systems is often not centralised. Some applications may require data to be combined from several systems. These several systems could well have data is redundant as well as inconsistent (that is, different copies of the same data may have different values).Data inconsistencies are often encountered in everyday life. For example, we have all come across situations when a new address is communicated to an organisation that we deal with (e.g.: a bank), we find that some of the communications from that organisation are received at the new address while others continue to be mailed to the old address. Combining all the data in a database would involve reduction in redundancy as well as inconsistency. It also is likely to reduce the costs for collection, storage and updating of data. With DBMS, data items needs to be recorded only once and are available for everyone to use. 2. Better service to the Users: A DBMS is often used to provide better service to the users. In conventional systems, Availability of information is often poor since it normally is difficult to obtain information that the existing systems were not designed for. Once several conventional systems are combined to form one centralised data base, the availability of information and its up-to-datedness is likely to improve since the data can now be shared and the DBMS makes it easy to respond to unforeseen information requests. Centralizing the data in a database also often means that users can obtain new and combined information that would have been impossible to obtain otherwise. Also, use of a DBMS should allow users that do not know programming to interact with the data more easily. The ability to quickly obtain new and combined information is becoming increasingly important. An organisation running a conventional data processing system would require new programs to be written to meet every new demand. 3. Flexibility of the system is improved: Changes are often necessary to the contents of data stored in any system. These changes are more easily made in a database than in a conventional system in that these changes do not need to have any impact on application programs. Thus data

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processing becomes more flexible and enables it to respond more quickly to the expanding needs of the business. 4. Cost of developing, implementation and maintaining systems is lower: It is much easier to respond to unforeseen requests when the data is centralized in a database than when it is stored in conventional file systems. Although the initial cost of setting up of a database can be large, the input/output routines normally coded by the programmers are now handled through the DBMS,the amount of time and money spent writing an application program is reduced. Since the programmer spends less time writing applications, the amount of time required to implementing implement new applications is reduced. 5. Security can be improved: In conventional systems, applications are developed in an ad hoc manner. Often different system of an organisation would access different components of the operational data. In such an environment, enforcing security can be quite difficult. Setting up of a database makes it easier to enforce security restrictions since the data is now centralised. It is easier to control who has access to what parts of the database. However, setting up a database can also make it easier for a determined person to breach security. 6. Integrity can be improved: Since the data of the organisation using a database approach is centralised and would be used by a no of users at a time, it is essential to enforce integrity controls. Integrity may be compromised in many ways. For example, A student may be shown to have borrowed books but has no enrolment. Salary of a staff member in one department may be coming out of the budget of another department. If a no of users are allowed to update the same data item at the same time, there is a possibility that the result of the updates is not quite what was intended. Controls therefore must be introduced to prevent such errors to occur because of concurrent updating activities.however, since all data is stored only once, it is often easier to maintain integrity than in conventional systems.

Moving from Database to Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is often used as the basis for a decision-support system (also referred to from an analytical perspective as a business intelligence system). It is designed to overcome some of the problems encountered when an organization attempts to perform strategic analysis using the same database that is used to perform online transaction processing (OLTP). A typical OLTP system is characterized by having large numbers of concurrent users actively adding and modifying data. The database represents the state of a particular business function at a specific point in time, such as an airline reservation system. However, the large volume of data maintained in many OLTP systems can overwhelm an organization. As databases grow larger with more complex data, response time can deteriorate quickly due to competition for available resources. A typical OLTP system has

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many users adding new data to the database while fewer users generate reports from the database. As the volume of data increases, reports take longer to generate. As organizations collect increasing volumes of data by using OLTP database systems, the need to analyze data becomes more acute. Typically, OLTP systems are designed specifically to manage transaction processing and minimize disk storage requirements by a series of related, normalized tables. However, when users need to analyze their data, a myriad of problems often prohibits the data from being used:

Users may not understand the complex relationships among the tables, and therefore cannot generate ad hoc queries. Application databases may be segmented across multiple servers, making it difficult for users to find the tables in the first place. Security restrictions may prevent users from accessing the detail data they need. Database administrators prohibit ad hoc querying of OLTP systems, to prevent analytical users from running queries that could slow down the performance of mission-critical production databases.

By copying an OLTP system to a reporting server on a regularly scheduled basis, an organization can improve response time for reports and queries. Yet a schema optimized for OLTP is often not flexible enough for decision support applications, largely due to the volume of data involved and the complexity of normalized relational tables. For example, each regional sales manager in a company may wish to produce a monthly summary of the sales per region. Because the reporting server contains data at the same level of detail as the OLTP system, the entire month's data is summarized each time the report is generated. The result is longer-running queries that lower user satisfaction. Additionally, many organizations store data in multiple heterogeneous database systems. Reporting is more difficult because data is not only stored in different places, but in different formats. Data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP) provide solutions to these problems. Data warehousing is an approach to storing data in which heterogeneous data sources (typically from multiple OLTP databases) are migrated to a separate homogenous data store. Data warehouses provide these benefits to analytical users:

Data is organized to facilitate analytical queries rather than transaction processing. Differences among data structures across multiple heterogeneous databases can be resolved. Data transformation rules can be applied to validate and consolidate data when data is moved from the OLTP database into the data warehouse. Security and performance issues can be resolved without requiring changes in the production systems.

Sometimes organizations maintain smaller, more topic-oriented data stores called data marts. In contrast to a data warehouse which typically encapsulates all of an enterprise's analytical data, a data mart is typically a subset of the enterprise data targeted at a smaller set of users or business functions.

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Whereas a data warehouse or data mart is the data stores for analytical data, OLAP is the technology that enables client applications to efficiently access the data. OLAP provides these benefits to analytical users:

Pre-aggregation of frequently queried data, enabling a very fast response time to ad hoc queries. An intuitive multidimensional data model that makes it easy to select, navigate, and explore the data. A powerful tool for creating new views of data based upon a rich array of ad hoc calculation functions. Technology to manage security, client/server query management and data caching, and facilities to optimize system performance based upon user needs.

DATAWAREHOUSE
A data warehouse is a repository (or archive) of information gathered from multiple sources, stored under a unified schema, at a single site. Once gathered, the data are stored for a long time, permitting access to historical data. Large companies have presences in many places, each of which may generate a large volume of data. For instance, large retail chains have hundreds or thousands of stores, whereas insurance companies may have data from thousands of local branches. Further, large organizations have a complex internal organization structure, and therefore different data may be present in different locations, or on different operational systems, or under different schemas. For instance, manufacturingproblem data and customer-complaint data may be stored on different database systems. Corporate decision makers require access to information from all such sources. Setting up queries on individual sources is both cumbersome and inefficient. Moreover, the sources of data may store only current data, whereas decision makers may need access to past data as well; for instance, information about how purchase patterns have changed in the past year could be of great importance. Data warehouses provide a solution to these problems. Thus, data warehouses provide the user a single consolidated interface to data, making decision-support queries easier to write. Moreover, by accessing information for decision support from a data warehouse, the decision maker ensures that online transactionprocessing systems are not affected by the decision-support workload. A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers: staging, integration, and access. Staging is used to store raw data for use by developers. The integration layer is used to integrate data and to have a level of abstraction from users. The access layer is for getting data out for users. This definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. The main source of the data is cleaned, transformed, catalogued and made available for use by managers and other business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support.

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Data-warehouse Architecture

Components of a Data Warehouse

The above diagram shows the architecture of a typical data warehouse, and illustrates the gathering of data, the storage of data, and the querying and data-analysis support. Among the issues to be addressed in building a warehouse are the following:

When and how to gather data

In a source-driven architecture for gathering data, the data sources transmit new information, either continually (as transaction processing takes place), or periodically (nightly, for example). In a destination-driven architecture, the data warehouse periodically sends requests for new data to the sources. Unless updates at the sources are replicated at the warehouse via two-phase commit, the warehouse will never be quite up to date with the sources. Two-phase commit is usually far too expensive to be an option, so data warehouses typically have slightly out-of-date data. That, however, is usually not a problem for decision-support systems.

What schema to use

Data sources that have been constructed independently are likely to have different schemas. In fact, they may even use different data models. Part of the task of a warehouse is to perform schema integration, and to convert data to the integrated schema before they are stored. As a result, the data stored in the warehouse are not just a copy of the data at the sources. Instead, they can be thought of as a materialized view of the data at the sources.

Data cleansing
The task of correcting and pre-processing data is called data cleansing. Data sources often deliver data with numerous minor inconsistencies that can be corrected. For example, names are often misspelled, and addresses may have street/area/city names misspelled, or zip codes entered incorrectly. These can be corrected to a reasonable extent by consulting a
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database of street names and zip codes in each city. Address lists collected from multiple sources may have duplicates that need to be eliminated in a mergepurge operation. Records for multiple individuals in a house may be grouped together so only one mailing is sent to each house; this operation is called house holding.

How to propagate updates

Updates on relations at the data sources must be propagated to the data warehouse. If the relations at the data warehouse are exactly the same as those at the data source, the propagation is straightforward. If they are not, the problem of propagating updates is basically the view-maintenance problem.

What data to summarize

The raw data generated by a transaction-processing system may be too large to store online. However, we can answer many queries by maintaining just summary data obtained by aggregation on a relation, rather than maintaining the entire relation. For example, instead of storing data about every sale of clothing, we can store total sales of clothing by item name and category.

WHAT IS DATA WAREHOUSING?

A process of transforming data into information and making it available to users in a timely enough manner to make a difference.

INFORMATION

DATA
Hence it is a Process or Technique for assembling and managing data from various sources for the purpose of answering business questions. Thus making decisions that were not previous possible.A decision support database maintained separately from the organizations operational database.

EVOLUTION
60s: Batch reports hard to find and analyze information inflexible and expensive, reprogram every new request 70s: Terminal-based DSS and EIS (executive information systems) still inflexible, not integrated with desktop tools
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query tools, spreadsheets, GUIs easier to use, but only access operational databases 90s: Data warehousing with integrated OLAP engines and tools

Benefits of a Data ware house

A data warehouse maintains a copy of information from the source transaction systems. This architectural complexity provides the opportunity to:

Maintain data history, even if the source transaction systems do not. Integrate data from multiple source systems, enabling a central view across the enterprise. This benefit is always valuable, but particularly so when the organization has grown by merger.

Improve data, by providing consistent codes and descriptions, flagging or even fixing bad data. Present the organization's information consistently. Provide a single common data model for all data of interest regardless of the data's source. Restructure the data so that it makes sense to the business users. Restructure the data so that it delivers excellent query performance, even for complex analytic queries, without impacting the operational systems. Add value to operational business applications, notably customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

APPLICATIONS OF DATA WAREHOUSING

Decision support Trend analysis Financial forecasting Churn Prediction for Telecom subscribers, Credit Card users etc. Insurance fraud analysis Call record analysis Logistics and Inventory management Agriculture

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A data mart is typically defined as a subset of the contents of a data warehouse, stored within its own database. A data mart tends to contain data focused at the department level, or on a specific business area. The data can exist at both the detail and summary levels. The data mart can be populated with data taken directly from operational sources, similar to a data warehouse, or data taken from the data warehouse itself. Because the volume of data in a data mart is less than that in a data warehouse, query processing is often faster. Characteristics of a data mart include:

Quicker and simpler implementation. Lower implementation cost. Needs of a specific business unit or function met. Protection of sensitive information stored elsewhere in the data warehouse. Faster response times due to lower volumes of data. Distribution of data marts to user organizations. Built from the bottom upward.

Departmental or regional divisions often determine whether data marts or data warehouses are used. For example, if managers in different sales regions require data from only their region, then it can be beneficial to build data marts containing specific regional data. If regional managers require access to all the organization's data, then a larger data warehouse is usually necessary. Although data marts are often designed to contain data relating to a specific business function, there can be times when users need a broader level of business data. However, because this broader-level data is often only needed in summarized form, it is acceptable to store it within each data mart rather than implementing a full data warehouse. Hence Data Mart is needed because organizations both big and small need more analysis on a narrower range of data than provided by a data warehouse, it deliver value quickly, with less complexity and expense than a data warehouse. Data marts are not data driven, but are a response to real business needs Building a Data Warehouse from Data Marts Data warehouses can be built using a top-down or bottom-up approach. Top-down describes the process of building a data warehouse for the entire organization, containing data from multiple, heterogeneous, operational sources. The bottom-up approach describes the process of building data marts for departments, or specific business areas, and then joining them to provide the data for the entire organization. Building a data warehouse from the bottom-up, by implementing data marts, is often simpler because it is less ambitious. A common approach to using data marts and data warehouses involves storing all detail data within the data warehouse, and summarized versions within data marts. Each data mart contains summarized data per functional split within the business, such as sales region or product group, further reducing the data volume per data mart.

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Data Mart Considerations Data marts can be useful additions or alternatives to the data warehouse, but issues to consider before implementation include:

Additional hardware and software. Time required to populate each data mart regularly. Consistency with other data marts and the data warehouse. Network access (if each data mart is located in a different geographical region).

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DATA MINING What is Data Mining?

Data mining, or knowledge discovery(the analysis step of the Knowledge Discovery in Databases process, or KDD), is the computer-assisted process of digging through and analyzing enormous sets of data and then extracting the meaning of the data. Generally, data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining tools predict behaviours and future trends, allowing businesses to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Data mining tools can answer business questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve. They scour databases for hidden patterns, finding predictive information that experts may miss because it lies outside their expectations. Data mining derives its name from the similarities between searching for valuable information in a large database and mining a mountain for a vein of valuable ore. Both processes require either sifting through an immense amount of material, or intelligently probing it to find where the value resides. Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. Companies have used powerful computers to sift through volumes of supermarket scanner data and analyze market research reports for years. However, continuous innovations in computer processing power, disk storage, and statistical software are dramatically increasing the accuracy of analysis while driving down the cost.

The Evolution of Data Mining

Data mining is a natural development of the increased use of computerized databases to store data and provide answers to business analysts. Evolutionary Step Business Question Enabling Technology "What was my total Data Collection (1960s) revenue in the last five computers, tapes, disks years?" Data Access (1980s) "What were unit sales faster and cheaper computers with more in New England last storage, relational databases March?" faster and cheaper computers with more storage, On-line analytical processing (OLAP), multidimensional databases, data warehouses

"What were unit sales Data Warehousing and in New England last Decision Support March? Drill down to Boston." Data Mining

"What's likely to happen to Boston unit faster and cheaper computers with more sales next month? storage, advanced computer algorithms Why?"

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Traditional query and report tools have been used to describe and extract what is in a database. The user forms a hypothesis about a relationship and verifies it or discounts it with a series of queries against the data. For example, an analyst might hypothesize that people with low income and high debt are bad credit risks and query the database to verify or disprove this assumption. Data mining can be used to generate a hypothesis. For example, an analyst might use a neural net to discover a pattern that analysts did not think to try - for example, that people over 30 years old with low incomes and high debt but who own their own homes and have children are good credit risks.

Need for Data Mining

Nowadays, large quantities of data is being accumulated. The amount of data collected is said to be almost doubled every 9 months. Seeking knowledge from massive data is one of the most desired attributes of Data Mining. Data could be large in two senses. In terms of size, e.g. for Image Data or in terms of dimensionality, e.g. for Gene expression data. Usually there is a huge gap from the stored data to the knowledge that could be construed from the data. This transition won't occur automatically, that's where Data Mining comes into picture. In Exploratory Data Analysis, some initial knowledge is known about the data, but Data Mining could help in a more in-depth knowledge about the data. Manual data analysis has been around for some time now, but it creates a bottleneck for large data analysis. Fast developing computer science and engineering techniques and methodology generates new demands. Data Mining techniques are now being applied to all kinds of domains, which are rich in data, e.g. Image Mining and Gene data analysis.

What Can Data Mining Do?

Although data mining is still in its infancy, companies in a wide range of industries including retail, finance, health care, manufacturing transportation, and aerospace - are already using data mining tools and techniques to take advantage of historical data. It enables these companies to determine relationships among "internal" factors such as price, product positioning, or staff skills, and "external" factors such as economic indicators, competition, and customer demographics. And, it enables them to determine the impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and corporate profits. Finally, it enables them to "drill down" into summary information to view detail transactional data By using pattern recognition technologies and statistical and mathematical techniques to sift through warehoused information, data mining helps analysts recognize significant facts, relationships, trends, patterns, exceptions and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Use of Data Mining Services

All businesses depends on data some way or the other. While some have data as their underlying procedures, others base their business proceedings on it. Data mining services are of greatest importance in applications like

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IES::MMS Understanding Customer needs Product analysis Demand and supply analysis E-commerce trends Telecommunications etc.

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For businesses, data mining is used to discover patterns and relationships in the data in order to help make better business decisions. Data mining can help spot sales trends, develop smarter marketing campaigns, and accurately predict customer loyalty. Specific uses of data mining include:

Market segmentation - Identify the common characteristics of customers who buy the same products from your company. Customer churn - Predict which customers are likely to leave your company and go to a competitor. Fraud detection - Identify which transactions are most likely to be fraudulent. Direct marketing - Identify which prospects should be included in a mailing list to obtain the highest response rate. Interactive marketing - Predict what each individual accessing a Web site is most likely interested in seeing. Market basket analysis - Understand what products or services are commonly purchased together; e.g., beer and diapers. Trend analysis - Reveal the difference between a typical customer this month and last.

Data mining technology can generate new business opportunities by: Automated prediction of trends and behaviors: Data mining automates the process of finding predictive information in a large database. Questions that traditionally required extensive hands-on analysis can be directly answered from the data. A typical example of a predictive problem is targeted marketing. Data mining uses data on past promotional mailings to identify the targets most likely to maximize return on investment in future mailings. Other predictive problems include forecasting bankruptcy and other forms of default, and identifying segments of a population likely to respond similarly to given events. Automated discovery of previously unknown patterns: Data mining tools sweep through databases and identify previously hidden patterns. An example of pattern discovery is the analysis of retail sales data to identify seemingly unrelated products that are often purchased together. Other pattern discovery problems include detecting fraudulent credit card transactions and identifying anomalous data that could represent data entry keying errors. Using massively parallel computers, companies dig through volumes of data to discover patterns about their customers and products. For example, grocery chains have found that when men go to a supermarket to buy diapers, they sometimes walk out with a six-pack of beer as well. Using that information, it's possible to lay out a store so that these items are closer.

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AT&T, A.C. Nielson, and American Express are among the growing ranks of companies implementing data mining techniques for sales and marketing. These systems are crunching through terabytes of point-of-sale data to aid analysts in understanding consumer behavior and promotional strategies. Why? To gain a competitive advantage and increase profitability! Similarly, financial analysts are plowing through vast sets of financial records, data feeds, and other information sources in order to make investment decisions. Health-care organizations are examining medical records to understand trends of the past so they can reduce costs in the future.

How does data mining work?

While large-scale information technology has been evolving separate transaction and analytical systems, data mining provides the link between the two. Data mining software analyzes relationships and patterns in stored transaction data based on open-ended user queries. Several types of analytical software are available: statistical, machine learning, and neural networks. Generally, any of four types of relationships are sought:

Classes: Stored data is used to locate data in predetermined groups. For example, a restaurant chain could mine customer purchase data to determine when customers visit and what they typically order. This information could be used to increase traffic by having daily specials. Clusters: Data items are grouped according to logical relationships or consumer preferences. For example, data can be mined to identify market segments or consumer affinities. Associations: Data can be mined to identify associations. The beer-diaper example is an example of associative mining. Sequential patterns: Data is mined to anticipate behavior patterns and trends. For example, an outdoor equipment retailer could predict the likelihood of a backpack being purchased based on a consumer's purchase of sleeping bags and hiking shoes.

Data mining consists of five major elements:

Extract, transform, and load transaction data onto the data warehouse system. Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system. Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals. Analyze the data by application software. Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.

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Data Mining Technologies

The analytical techniques used in data mining are often well-known mathematical algorithms and techniques. What is new is the application of those techniques to general business problems made possible by the increased availability of data and inexpensive storage and processing power. Also, the use of graphical interfaces has led to tools becoming available that business experts can easily use. Some of the tools used for data mining are:

Artificial neural networks: Non-linear predictive models that learn through training and resemble biological neural networks in structure. Genetic algorithms: Optimization techniques that use processes such as genetic combination, mutation, and natural selection in a design based on the concepts of natural evolution. Decision trees: Tree-shaped structures that represent sets of decisions. These decisions generate rules for the classification of a dataset. Specific decision tree methods include Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) . CART and CHAID are decision tree techniques used for classification of a dataset. They provide a set of rules that you can apply to a new (unclassified) dataset to predict which records will have a given outcome. CART segments a dataset by creating 2-way splits while CHAID segments using chi square tests to create multi-way splits. CART typically requires less data preparation than CHAID. Nearest neighbour method: A technique that classifies each record in a dataset based on a combination of the classes of the k record(s) most similar to it in a historical dataset (where k 1). Sometimes called the k-nearest neighbor technique. Rule induction: The extraction of useful if-then rules from data based on statistical significance. Data visualization: The visual interpretation of complex relationships in multidimensional data. Graphics tools are used to illustrate data relationships.

Example
For example, one Midwest grocery chain used the data mining capacity of Oracle software to analyze local buying patterns. They discovered that when men bought diapers on Thursdays and Saturdays, they also tended to buy beer. Further analysis showed that these shoppers typically did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturdays. On Thursdays, however, they only bought a few items. The retailer concluded that they purchased the beer to have it available for the upcoming weekend. The grocery chain could use this newly discovered information in various ways to increase revenue. For example, . Using that information, it's possible to lay out a store so that these items are closer. They could

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move the beer display closer to the diaper display. And, they could make sure beer and diapers were sold at full price on Thursdays.

The Future of Data Mining

In the short-term, the results of data mining will be in profitable, if mundane, business related areas. Micro-marketing campaigns will explore new niches. Advertising will target potential customers with new precision. In the medium term, data mining may be as common and easy to use as e-mail. We may use these tools to find the best airfare to New York, root out a phone number of a long-lost classmate, or find the best prices on lawn mowers. The long-term prospects are truly exciting. Imagine intelligent agents turned loose on medical research data or on sub-atomic particle data. Computers may reveal new treatments for diseases or new insights into the nature of the universe.

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DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

Defining the Concept
Decision support system: An interactive software-based computerized information system intended to help decisionmakers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and business models to identify and solve problems and to make decisions. DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

DSS components may be classified as:

Inputs: Factors, numbers, and characteristics to analyze User Knowledge and Expertise: Inputs requiring manual analysis by the user Outputs: Transformed data from which DSS "decisions" are generated Decisions: Results generated by the DSS based on user criteria

High-level Decision Support System Requirements:

Data collection from multiple sources (sales data, inventory data, supplier data, market research data. etc.) Data formatting and collation A suitable database location and format built for decision support -based reporting and analysis Robust tools and applications to report, monitor, and analyze the data

Types of Decision Support System Models

It is important to note that the DSS field does not have a universally accepted model. That is to say, there are many theories vying for supremacy in this broad field. Because there are many working DSS theories, there are many ways to classify DSS. For instance, one of the DSS models available bears the relationship of the user in mind. This model takes into consideration passive, active, and cooperative DSS models.
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Decision Support Systems that just collect data and organize it effectively are usually called passive models. They do not suggest a specific decision, and they only reveal the data. An active DSS actually processes data and explicitly shows solutions based upon that data. While there are many systems that can be active, many organizations would be hard pressed to put all their faith into a computer model without any human intervention. A cooperative Decision Support System is when data is collected, analyzed, and then given to a human who helps the system revise or refine it. Here, both a human and computer component work together to come up with the best solution. While the above DSS model considers the users relationship, another popular DSS model sees the mode of assistance as the underlying basis of the DSS model. This includes the Model Driven DSS, Communications Driven DSS, Data Driven DSS, Document Driven DSS, and Knowledge Driven DSS. A Model Driven DSS is one in which decision makers use statistical simulations or financial models to come up with a solution or strategy. Though these decisions are based on models, they do not have to be overwhelmingly data intensive. A Communications Driven DSS model is one in which many collaborate to come up with a series of decisions to set a solution or strategy in motion. This model can be in an office environment or on the web. A Data Driven DSS model puts its emphasis on collected data that is then manipulated to fit the decision makers needs. This data can be internal or external and in a variety of formats. It is important that data is collected and categorized sequentially, for example daily sales, operating budgets from one quarter to the next, inventory over the previous year, etc. A Document Driven DSS model uses a variety of documents such as text documents, spreadsheets, and database records to come up with decisions as well as further manipulate the information to refine strategies. A Knowledge Driven DSS model uses special rules stored in a computer or that a human uses to determine whether a decision should be made. For instance, many day traders see a stop loss limit as a knowledge driven DSS model. These rules or facts are used in order to make a decision. The scope in which decisions are made can also be seen as a DSS model. For instance, an organizational, departmental, or single user decision can be seen in the scope-wide model.

Decision-Support Systems
Database applications can be broadly classified into transaction processing and decision Support. Transaction-processing systems are widely used today, and companies have accumulated a vast amount of information generated by these systems. For example, company databases often contain enormous quantities of information about customers and transactions. The size of the information storage required may range up to hundreds of gigabytes, or even terabytes, for large retail chains.Transaction information for a retailer may include the name or identifier (such as credit-card number) of the customer, the items purchased, the price paid, and the dates on which the purchases were made. Information about the items purchased may include the name of the item, the
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manufacturer, the model number, the color, and the size. Customer information may include credit history, annual income, residence, age, and even educational background. Such large databases can be treasure troves of information for making business decisions, such as what items to stock and what discounts to offer. For instance, a retail company may notice a sudden spurt in purchases of flannel shirts in the Pacific Northwest, may realize that there is a trend, and may start stocking a larger number of such shirts in shops in that area. As another example, a car company may find, on querying its database, that most of its small sports cars are bought by young women whose annual incomes are above $50,000. The company may then target its marketing to attract more such women to buy its small sports cars, and may avoid wasting money trying to attract other categories of people to buy those cars. In both cases, the company has identified patterns in customer behavior, and has used the patterns to make business decisions.

Decision Support Systems delivered by Micro Strategy Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools, processes, and methodologies are key components to any decision support system and provide end users with rich reporting, monitoring, and data analysis. Micro Strategy provides companies with a unified reporting, analytical, and monitoring platform that forms the core of any Decision Support System. The software exemplifies all of the important characteristics of an ideal Decision Support System:

Supports individual and group decision making: Micro Strategy provides a single platform that allows all users to access the same information and access the same version of truth, while providing autonomy to individual users and development groups to design reporting content locally. Easy to develop and deploy: Micro Strategy delivers an interactive, scalable platform for rapidly developing and deploying projects. Multiple projects can be created within a single shared metadata. Within each project, development teams create a wide variety of re-usable metadata objects. As decision support system deployment expands within an organization, the Micro Strategy platform effortlessly supports an increasing concurrent user base. Comprehensive Data Access: Micro Strategy software allows users to access data from different sources concurrently, leaving organizations the freedom to choose the data warehouse that best suits their unique requirements and preferences. Integrated software: Micro Strategys integrated platform enables administrators and IT professionals to develop data models, perform sophisticated analysis, generate analytical reports, and deliver these reports to end users via different channels (Web, email, file, print and mobile devices). This eliminates the need for companies to spend countless effort purchasing and integrating disparate software products in an attempt to deliver a consistent user experience. Flexibility: Micro Strategy SDK (Software Development Kit) exposes its vast functionality through an extensive library of APIs. Micro Strategy customers can choose to leverage the power of the softwares flexible APIs to design and deploy solutions tailored to their unique business needs.
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Benefits
1. Helps automate managerial processes 2. Improves personal efficiency 3. Speed up the process of decision making 4. Increases organizational control 5. Encourages exploration and discovery on the part of the decision maker 6. Speeds up problem solving in an organization 7. Facilitates interpersonal communication 8. Promotes learning or training 9. Generates new evidence in support of a decision 10. Creates a competitive advantage over competition 11. Reveals new approaches to thinking about the problem space 12. Helps automate managerial processes

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In computing, online analytical processing, or OLAP is an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining. Typical applications of OLAP include business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications coming up, such as agriculture. The term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term OLTP (Online Transaction Processing).

OLAP tools enable users to interactively analyze multidimensional data from multiple perspectives. OLAP consists of three basic analytical operations: consolidation, drilldown, and slicing and dicing. Consolidation involves the aggregation of data that can be accumulated and computed in one or more dimensions. For example, all sales offices are rolled up to the sales department or sales division to anticipate sales trends. In contrast, the drill-down is a technique that allows users to navigate through the details. For instance, users can access to the sales by individual products that make up a regions sales. Slicing and dicing is a feature whereby users can take out (slicing) a specific set of data of the cube and view (dicing) the slices from different viewpoints.

Databases configured for OLAP use a multidimensional data model, allowing for complex analytical and ad-hoc queries with a rapid execution time. They borrow aspects of databases, hierarchical and relational databases.

Types

1) MOLAP is the 'classic' form of OLAP and is sometimes referred to as just OLAP. MOLAP stores this data in optimized multi-dimensional array storage, rather than in a relational database. Therefore it requires the pre-computation and storage of information in the cube - the operation known as processing. 2) ROLAP works directly with relational databases. The base data and the dimension tables are stored as relational tables and new tables are created to hold the aggregated information.

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3) HOLAP There is no clear agreement across the industry as to what constitutes "Hybrid OLAP", except that a database will divide data between relational and specialized storage. For example, for some vendors, a HOLAP database will use relational tables to hold the larger quantities of detailed data, and use specialized storage for at least some aspects of the smaller quantities of more-aggregate or lessdetailed data.

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WE TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE CONSTANT HELP AND ENCOURAGEMENT GIVEN TO US BY, PROF. MRUNAL JOSHI, UNDER HER DIRECTION THE STUDY WAS UNDERTAKEN AND COMPLETED. WE WILL REMAIN GREATFUL TO HER FOR HER EXPERT GUIDANCE AND INSPIRING ATTITUDE AND GIVING PROPER DIRECTION TO DISSERTATION.

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