data warehousing

Infospecialists extract corporate data from the company’s existing systems, validate it and create a Data Warehouse. A data warehouse is a database geared towards the business intelligence requirements of an organisation. The data warehouse integrates data from the various operational systems and is typically loaded from these systems at regular intervals. Data warehouses contain historical information that enables analysis of business performance over time. A Data Warehouse stores the corporate data of the company as a whole, however, there is also a database that is used for storing the data for a particular department or business area, this is called a Data Mart.

A Data Mart however is, a type of data warehouse designed primarily to address a specific function or department's needs, as opposed to a data warehouse which is traditionally meant to address the needs of the organisation from an enterprise perspective. In addition, a data mart often uses aggregation or summarisation of the data to enhance query performance. However, it is important to maintain the ability to access the underlying base data to enable drill-down analysis as necessary.