The Physical Design Process of the Data Warehouse

The Physical Design Process of the Data Warehouse

A data warehouse can be viewed in its physical perspective . The physical perspective deduces the logical perspective as physical components of the data warehouse . This covers the type of network , the data processors , and the kind of communications channels which aims on the reliability performance in the presence of very large amount of slowly changing data . However , the logical counterpart is a bit different . Essentially , the logical perspective forms the primary basis for the physical perspective . In this case , the logical model of a

data warehouse describes the structure and data characteristics of the different processes involved . In other words , the logical perspective covers the what ' of a process while the physical perspective gives details on how ' of the process

There are a number of activities involved during the transformation from the logical model to the physical model . Key components in the physical design are created during the course of transformation and these are the following : confirming object names to standards , altering data types for attributes , assigning proper data type to keys specifying constraints for attributes , defining foreign key relationships , and making considerations for the selected DBMS

The physical design process of a data warehouse has to be substantial relative to its physical storage and performance . In this case , the major areas of concern of the physical design process are on the improvements of performance on the usage of data and the management of the stored data . To ensure top performance , proper management along with proper administration of these stored data guarantees the shortest possible response time and have to be maintained at a certain level Furthermore , regular monitoring of these factors would keep the data warehouse fine-tuned . A data warehouse should have the ability to adopt methods to address the growth of queries as the number of users increase . What 's more , flexibility of the physical design process gives additional help to the keep the design open and ease on any future changes

The efficiency of the data warehouse is tied to where it stores and how it manages data to its physical storage . As such , the data warehouse has three sets of physical data structures : data staging area , data warehouse repository , and OLAP system . The data staging area comprises of different levels of data , starting from top of the model : data extract flat s , relational database data s (transformed data relational database index s , and load image flat s . In the data warehouse repository , it contents the data and index tables in the data warehouse , specifically , the relational database data s (warehouse data , and relational database index s it also includes blocks and records of data such as the partitioned physical s , and the detailed data and light summaries . For the OLAP system , it envelopes multidimensional data which in most cases the storing and retrieval of data is dictated by the supporting proprietary software

To a large extent , RAID technology has become a fad for today 's data warehouses and...