Data Warehouse

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The overall process of providing information to support business decision making is referred to as either data warehousing or business intelligence. The terms are used interchangeably and often as acronyms like DW/BI, DWH, EDW and BI.

EDW stands for enterprise data warehouse.

You can think of the conformed dimensions and facts of an enterprise as a standard set of connection points for applications — in other words, as a data warehouse bus architecture.

The corresponding bus matrix identifies the key business processes of an organisation, along with their associated dimensions. Business processes (typically corresponding to major source systems) are listed as matrix rows, while dimensions appear as matrix columns. The cells of the matrix are then marked to indicate which dimensions apply to which processes.

In a single document, the data warehouse team has a tool for planning the overall data warehouse, identifying the shared dimensions across the enterprise, coordinating the efforts of separate implementation teams, and communicating the importance of shared dimensions throughout the organisation.

Data warehouse bus architecture. The bus architecture is based on standardised dimensions and facts that let separate data marts, fact tables or OLAP cubes coexist and integrate. In this context, the term bus is not a large motor vehicle. Instead, it refers to the term's early meaning in the electrical power industry (a conductor for collecting electrical currents and distributing them) and commonly used in the computer industry to describe the standard interface specification that lets peripheral devices usefully coexist. Ralph Kimball is credited with associating these fundamental bus concepts to the data warehouse delivery and presentation environment.

Here are examples of a bus matrix: