Data Warehousing

Business intelligence : The purpose of business intelligence is to collect adequate information about a company 's competitors , including marketing information (e . g . pricing , terms and product specifications history , market share , marketing policies , relations with customers methods of distribution , and advertising program etc , product information (e . g . breadth of line , processing and technology , product cost and capacity , location and size of production facilities packaging , delivery , research and development capability etc , and organizational and financial information (key decision makers , financial condition and outlook , expansion and acquisition programs , major problems and opportunities etc

(Cleland King , 1975 . The information obtained can be further used to adjust company 's policies to make them more competitive , find the most appropriate market niche , or engage in benchmarking

Distributed databases : In a distributed database , data are stored at several locations , and each of them is managed by a database management system that can run autonomously . Location of data can be made unknown to client , thus ensuring distributed data Independence . Clients can write transactions regardless of where the affected data are located thus ensuring distributed transaction atomicity (Bunn , 2001

On-line analytical processing : On-line analytical processing (OLAP ) is a tool for offering quick responses to data queries based on multidimensional data model . Typical elements of data analysis an OLAP can perform include `rollup (increasing the level of aggregation ) and drill-down (decreasing the level of aggregation or increasing detail along one or more dimension hierarchies , slice and dice (selection and projection , and pivot (re-orienting the multidimensional view of data (Chaudhuri Dayal , 1997 ,

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References

Bunn , J (2001 . `Distributed Databases ' Retrieved June 1 , 2008 , from pcbunn .cithep .caltech .edu /DistributedDatabasesPakistan .pdf

Chaudhuri , S Dayal , U (1997 . An Overview of Data Warehousing and OLAP Technology . ACM SIGMOD Record , 26 (1 , 65-74

Cleland , D .I King , W .R (1975 . Competitive Business Intelligence Systems . Business horizons , 18 (6 , 19-28...