TABLE OF CONTENTS A detailed look at the literature on data warehousing leads us to interpret figures 7.1 and 7.2 from three different perspectives: a conceptual (or business) perspective, a logical (or data modeling) perspective, and a physical (or distributed information flow) perspective. Any given data warehouse component or substructure can be analyzed from all three perspectives. Moreover, in the design, operation, and especially evolution of data warehouses, it is crucial that these three perspectives are maintained such that they are consistent with each other. Also, quality factors are often associated with specific perspectives or with specific relationships between perspectives. As can be seen in Figure 7.5, there are 9 data store component types, linked by at least 12 kinds of relationships maintained by data warehouse agents.
Following is a discussion of each perspective. Note that the discussion is purely at the schema level. Each data warehouse component is an instance of all three perspectives.
From a strategic management point of view, a data warehouse can be used to impose an overall business perspective a conceptual enterprise model on the information resources and analysis tasks of an organization. This enterprise model can be thought of as a class structure where the organization is simply an instance that the data warehouse maintains information about. Thus it is not part of the data warehouse itself. Instead, the data warehouse architecture is a network of direct and derived views (i.e., recorded observations) on this...
