Page 61 - DLIS408_INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY-APPLICATIONSL SCIENCES

Information Technology and Application

Notes Data Warehouse

Data warehouses archive data from operational databases and often from external sources such as
market research firms. Often operational data undergoes transformation on its way into the
warehouse, getting summarized, anonymized, reclassified, etc. The warehouse becomes the central
source of data for managers and other end-users who may not have access to operational data. For
example, sales data might be aggregated to weekly totals and converted from internal product
codes to use UPCs so that it can be compared with ACNielsen data. Some basic and essential
components of data warehousing include retrieving, analyzing, and mining data, transforming,
loading and managing data so as to make it available for further use.
Operations in a data warehouse are typically concerned with bulk data manipulation, and as such,
it is unusual and inefficient to target individual rows for update, insert or delete. Bulk native
loaders for input data and bulk SQL passes for aggregation are the norm.

Distributed Database

Usually Distributed database refers to spatial distribution of a database and possibly the DBMS
over computers and sometimes over different sites.

Examples are databases of local work-groups and departments at regional offices, branch offices,
manufacturing plants and other work sites.

Notes Distributed databases can include segments of both common operational and common
user databases, as well as data generated and used only at a user’s own site.

Document-oriented Database

Utilized to conveniently store, manage, edit and retrieve documents.

End-user Database
These databases consist of data developed by individual end-users. Examples of these are collections
of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, multimedia, and other files. Several products exist to
support such databases. Some of them are much simpler than full fledged DBMSs, with more
elementary DBMS functionality (e.g., not supporting multiple concurrent end-users on a same database),
with basic programming interfaces, and a relatively small “foot-print” (not much code to run as in
“regular” general-purpose databases). The general-purpose DBMSs can be used for such purpose
using basic user-interface subsets for basic database operations, while still enjoying the database
protections that these DBMSs can provide.

External Database
These databases contain data collected for use across multiple organizations, either freely or via
subscription. The Internet Movie Database is one example.

Graph Database

A graph database is a kind of NoSQL database that uses graph structures with nodes, edges, and
properties to represent and store information. General graph databases that can store any graph
are distinct from specialized graph databases such as triple stores and network databases.

Hypermedia Databases

The World Wide Web can be thought of as a database, albeit one spread across millions of
independent computing systems. Web browsers “process” this data one page at a time, while Web
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