What is Data Warehouse Testing?


Data Warehousing is an approach that can collect and handle data from multiple sources to give the business a meaningful business insight. A data warehouse is specifically designed to support management decisions.

In simple terms, a data warehouse defines a database that is maintained independently from an organization’s operational databases. Data warehouse systems enable the integration of multiple application systems. They provide data processing by offering a solid platform of consolidated, historical information for analysis.

Data warehouses generalize and centralize data in multidimensional space. The development of data warehouses includes data cleaning, data integration, and data transformation and can be viewed as an essential preprocessing step for data mining.

OLAP is an approach that surrounds data warehousing. In this model, data is saved in a format, which allows the effective creation of data mining/documents. OLAP design should accommodate documenting on large recordsets with a small degradation in operational effectiveness.

The whole term that can represent taking data structures in an OLTP structure and influencing similar data in an OLAP architecture is “Dimensional Modeling”. It is the basic building block of Data Warehousing.

The testing of the data warehouse checks the quality of the data such as data completeness to ensure that all the expected data is loaded and data transformation to ensure that all data is changed correctly as per the business rules or design specifications.

Testing the data warehouse operational environment is another key set of tests that will have to be performed. There is the following number of aspects that need to be tested which are as follows −

  • Security, which is difficult to test unless it is documented, but it is not allowed to reveal all the information. If there is a separate data warehouse security document, testing should be a relatively straightforward matter of extracting the list of disallowed operations and devising a test for each. This set of tests should run several times during system testing to ensure that newly added data does not break the constraint of security.

  • During the system testing, the disk configuration should be tested thoroughly to identify any potential I/O bottlenecks.

  • It can control the daily operations of the data warehouse, some scheduling software is required and this needs to be tested thoroughly during the system testing. The scheduling software will need the scheduler to control the overprocessing and management of the aggregations.

There are various challenges for testing the data warehouse which is as follows −

  • Data selection from multiple source systems.
  • Volume and complexity of the data.
  • Inconsistent and redundant information in a data warehouse.
  • Non-availability of the comprehensive test.

Ginni
Ginni

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Updated on: 16-Feb-2022

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