Need

Data recording and storage is growing. History is excellent predictor of the future. Gives total view of the organization. Intelligent decision -support is required for decision-making

Business
What happened? Why it happened? What will happen? What is happening? What do you want to happen?

 A complete repository of historical corporate data extracted from transaction systems that is available for ad-hoc access by knowledge workers
Complete repository All the data is present from all the branches/outlets of the business. Even the archived data may be brought online. Transaction System Management Information System (MIS) Ad-Hoc access Does not have a certain predefined database access pattern. Queries not known in advance. Difficult to write SQL in advance. Knowledge workers Typically NOT IT literate (Executives, Analysts, Managers). Decision makers.

 Subject oriented.
improve decision making, planning, and control of the major subjects of enterprises such as customer, products

Integrated.
loaded from different sources - different formats - focus on different aspects of the subject. has to be checked ,cleansed and transformed into a unified format to allow easy and fast access.

Time variant.
Every record in the data warehouse has some form of time variance associated with it In a warehouse as the data is loaded; the moment usually becomes its time stamp.

Non-volatile.

Concepts
Take all data from different operational systems. If necessary, add relevant data from industry. Transform all data and bring into a uniform format. Integrate all data as a single entity. Store data in a format supporting easy access for decision support. Create performance enhancing indices. Implement performance enhancement joins. Run ad-hoc queries with low selectivity.

MOLAP
Advantages Fast query performance due to optimized storage, multidimensional indexing and caching. Smaller size of data compared to relational database due to compression techniques. Automated computation of higher level aggregates of the data. It is very compact for low dimension data sets. Array models provide natural indexing. Effective data extraction achieved through the pre-structuring of aggregated data. Disadvantages processing step (data load) can be quite lengthy, especially on large data volumes & remedied by doing only incremental processing. MOLAP tools traditionally have difficulty querying models with dimensions with very high cardinality (i.e., millions of members). Some MOLAP products have difficulty updating and querying models with more than ten dimensions. This limit differs depending on the complexity and cardinality of the dimensions in question. It also depends on the number of facts or measures stored. Other MOLAP products can handle hundreds of dimensions. Some MOLAP methodologies introduce data redundancy.

ROLAP
Advantages
scalable in handling large data volumes, especially models with dimensions with very high cardinality (i.e., millions of members). load times are generally much shorter than with the automated MOLAP loads. The data are stored in a standard relational database and can be accessed by any SQL reporting tool (the tool does not have to be an OLAP tool). ROLAP tools are better at handling non-aggregatable facts (e.g., textual descriptions). MOLAP tools tend to suffer from slow performance when querying these elements. By decoupling the data storage from the multi-dimensional model, it is possible to successfully model data that would not otherwise fit into a strict dimensional model. The ROLAP approach can leverage database authorization controls such as row-level security, whereby the query results are filtered depending on preset criteria applied, for example, to a given user or group of users (SQL WHERE clause).

Disadvantages

The loading of aggregate tables must be managed by custom ETL code. The ROLAP tools do not help with this task. This means additional development time and more code to support. When the step of creating aggregate tables is skipped, the query performance then suffers because the larger detailed tables must be queried. This can be partially remedied by adding additional aggregate tables, however it is still not practical to create aggregate tables for all combinations of dimensions/attributes.