An overview of data warehousing and OLAP technology
ACM SIGMOD Record
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Relational database systems provide an infrastructure for supporting online transaction processing (q.v.). However, most relational stores are not optimized with regard to supporting summarization, aggregation, and ad hoc querying over large relational databases. As organizations began to rely increasingly on data to influence business decisions, the perceived roles of a database system within organizations has begun to evolve from being primarily data capture and reliable storage, to also enable decision support. Decision support imposes new requirements which include data exploration, summarization, analysis, and advanced reporting. The systems that use a database system as a central component in supporting decision support are referred to as data warehouses. The evolution of databases from being mainly transactional to being a repository of information to be analyzed by decision support tools is illustrated in Fig. 1. Some of the decision support tools are either natively supported in databases or are external client/middleware applications.