General Architecture

Source Data:

An organization will have many OLTP applications, all these operational data becomes the source for the Data Warehouse database.

ETL: (Extract Transform and Load)

We extract data from various operational systems and clean the data so that we get only the information make sense to have in Data Warehouse. While cleansing the data we may reject some records or we fill in the missing information. Once we transform the operational data to the format in which DW expects, then we load the data to DW. This process takes most of the time while developing DW applications.

DW Database

This is the area where we store the data which is required by the business so that they can run any report against the data. In data warehouses we will have current and history information which is very useful for trend analysis, behavioral analysis etc.

BI (Business Intelligence)

Using BI tools, business will get the information they need which is stored in the DW database.