Data Warehouse und OLAP — Analyseorientierte Informationssysteme für das Management

Management support systems are nowadays dominated by data warehouse concepts and multidimensional databases. Following this new paradigm of data support this paper will give a comprehensive overview of the structure and architecture of data warehouses and the benefits of analysing multidimensional business data. Starting with a short discussion of the basic concepts of data warehousing and on-line analytical processing the focus will be set on a reference architecture of a data warehouse. This includes OLAP information cubes and import mechanism. We will also describe the use and application areas of data warehousing e.g. database marketing and sales controlling but also executive information systems, and close with some remarks about forthcoming developments in this arena.