What are the elements of a data warehouse system?

There are various elements of a data warehouse system which are as follows −

Source System − An operational system of data whose service it is to capture the transactions of the business. A source system is known as a “legacy system” in a mainframe environment.

The features of the source system are uptime and availability. Queries opposite to source systems are definite, “account-based” queries that are elements of the normal transaction flow and firmly restricted in their demands on the legacy system.

Data Staging Area − A storage area and group of processes that simple, transform, combine, de-duplicate, household, archive, and produce source records for use in the data warehouse.

The data staging area is dominated by the smooth activities of sorting and sequential processing and the data staging area does not need to be based on relational technology. After it can check the data for conformance with all the one-to-one and many-to-one business rules it has defined, it can be pointless to take the last phase of building a completely blown entity-relation-based physical database design.

Business Process − A coherent group of business activities that create sense to the business users of our data warehouses. A business process is generally a group of activities such as “order processing” or “user pipeline management,” but business processes can overlap, and absolutely the definition of a single business process will develop over time.

Reporting − The data in the data warehouse should apply to the organization’s staff if the data warehouse is to be beneficial. There is a large number of software applications that implement this function, or reporting can be custom-developed. 

There are various reporting tools are as follows −

Business intelligence tools − These are software applications that analyze the process of development and management of business documents based on data warehouse data.

Executive information systems (known more widely as Dashboard (business) − These are software applications that can show complex business metrics and data graphically to enable rapid understanding.

Data Mining − Data mining tools are software that allows users to implement detailed numerical and statistical computations on detailed data warehouse data to identify trends, identify a pattern and interpret data.

Metadata − Metadata is data about the data which is required by the users. It can be used not only to inform operators and users of the data warehouse about its condition and the data held within the data warehouse but as an integration of incoming data and a tool to upgrade and clarify the fundamental data warehouse model.

Operations − A data warehouse operation includes the processes of loading, manipulating, and extracting data from the data warehouse. Operations also protect user administration, security, capacity management, and associated services.