Compare Data Integration And ETL

1. Compare data integration and ETL. How are they related?

Ans: Data integration consist of three processes: data access( accessing and extracting data from various sources), data federation ( combining different views of data) and capturing change. All these three process when correctly implemented provides data to ETL tool, which in turn apply its three processes and makes data available to the analysis tool of the data warehouse.

2. What is a data warehouse and what are its benefits? Why is Web accessibility important with a data warehouse?

Ans: Data warehouse can be defined as the repository of data. It is a pool of data which helps in decision making. It contains historical data as well as current data. The data usually first structured in a form that can be easily read by analytical processing activities like OLAP, data mining etc. The benefits of data warehouse are: it helps in decision making; it provides the single version of truth though the data is collected from various sources which in turn will help to determine the current state of business and identify problems, enhanced system performance and accessing of data is very simple. As many applications are web based, even the users access data via web and the data from web can be put into the data warehouse; web accessibility is important with data warehouse.

3. A data mart can replace a data warehouse or complement it. Compare and discuss these options.

Ans: When a data mart replaces data warehouse, data marts can be used for analysis purposes and it would be much less expensive to work with data mart but then they can be used only for specific business unit or department. When a data mart is used to complement a data warehouse it has the benefit of using the consis...

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...t. In class, debate the issue in terms of the benefits and costs as well as social factors.

Ans: According to experts, the knowledge and methodologies regarding the offshore development models are growing day by day which inspires many BI professionals to determine the feasibility of offshoring data warehousing and business activities. The challenges such as physical distance and communication are surmountable, even though the extraction, transformation and loading is realistic; the cost involved in interpreting the rules and regulation offset the initial cost but still as compared to building our own data warehouse, its feasible. The social benefits derived from offshoring is huge as it will create ample job opportunities for the people abroad which will improve their economy which in turn reduces one’s costs and help to improve its own economy while paying less.