Data Warehouse

Data warehouse systems collect, gather, merges and organizes data from variety of enterprise external and internal sources thus providing the basic information-data structure to be ready for analysis and information extraction operation.

Data warehouses are very similar to normal databases, in fact they are considered as large database with additional functionality, and all methods of query optimization, data partitioning, index selection are still under intensive research and development to increase their efficiency since they deal with large amounts of data, and the importance of getting the results in a time efficient manner ( Robert Wrembel and Christian Koncilia (eds) , 2007).

A data warehouse is a database designed for query and analysis rather than transaction processing, usually it makes use of the transaction data to build historical data repository, along with data from other sources, it allows merging data from different sources and prepare it for advanced queries over time series. Data warehouse is simply the foundation of all Decision Support System analysis.

http://www.clivemargolis.com/?p=68

http://www.askcindi.com/Flashpoint_Market.htm

The information needed by marketing managers comes from three main sources:

1) Internal company information – E.g. sales, orders, customer profiles, stocks, customer