Creating a Virtual Datawarehouse

Creating a Virtual Data Warehouse

March 5, 2012

Creating a Virtual Data Warehouse

The purpose of this article is to examine the possibilities of streamlining data warehousing so that the data does not become too heavy to be managed. The authors propose to "design and develop a virtual data warehouse without using any third party tools" (Jigeesh & Kondabolu, 2011, p. 49). This article is relevant because, although there is research regarding various data warehousing models, none have been created without the utilization of third party instrumentation.

For the purposes of this research, the authors selected a company that had been operating for ten years. The selected company was known for providing various information technology products and services to high tech manufacturing companies as well as semi-conductor industries. The manufacturing and semi-conductor companies needed such services in order to enhance their productivity and their performance. The selected company also helped the manufacturing companies gain a more consolidated perspective on their business activities. The authors did a company analysis and discovered that the size of the selected company's database required a great deal of time simply to process the data. This aspect alone made it very difficult to extract certain pieces of information from the system. It was the authors' premise that they could create a more economical data warehousing system that would allow the company to extract any information from the existing database more efficiently and effectively.

The authors examined the database tables that the organization was using and found that 40 database tables were being used to store the organization's transactional data. By examining the organization's goals and objectives, the authors were able to narrow the 40 database tables down to 24 categories that they identified as common business requirements. Eight specific tabs were created based on these business requirements. The users of the new data warehouse could then select their options from an existing list of values to get the results they were seeking. They could also feed data into designated fields to get the specific information they were seeking and not have to go through a rigorous and lengthy extraction process.

The result of the research was the design and implementation of a virtual data warehouse that the manufacturing companies could use for a variety of purposes, such as customer relations and sales. In order to help make the task of extracting data easier and less time-consuming, the authors created a series of interface screens in JAVA. This step allowed for easy access to data from the newly designed data warehouse.

The practical implications of this research show that creating