Data martA data mart is a structure/access pattern specific to data warehouse environments, used to retrieve client-facing data. The data mart is a subset of the data warehouse and is usually oriented to a specific business line or team. Whereas data warehouses have an enterprise-wide depth, the information in data marts pertains to a single department. In some deployments, each department or business unit is considered the owner of its data mart including all the hardware, software and data.
Snowflake schemaIn computing, a snowflake schema is a logical arrangement of tables in a multidimensional database such that the entity relationship diagram resembles a snowflake shape. The snowflake schema is represented by centralized fact tables which are connected to multiple dimensions. "Snowflaking" is a method of normalizing the dimension tables in a star schema. When it is completely normalized along all the dimension tables, the resultant structure resembles a snowflake with the fact table in the middle.
Star schemaIn computing, the star schema is the simplest style of data mart schema and is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional data marts. The star schema consists of one or more fact tables referencing any number of dimension tables. The star schema is an important special case of the snowflake schema, and is more effective for handling simpler queries. The star schema gets its name from the physical model's resemblance to a star shape with a fact table at its center and the dimension tables surrounding it representing the star's points.
Semantic integrationSemantic integration is the process of interrelating information from diverse sources, for example calendars and to do lists, email archives, presence information (physical, psychological, and social), documents of all sorts, contacts (including social graphs), search results, and advertising and marketing relevance derived from them. In this regard, semantics focuses on the organization of and action upon information by acting as an intermediary between heterogeneous data sources, which may conflict not only by structure but also context or value.
Data virtualizationData virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve and manipulate data without requiring technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted at source, or where it is physically located, and can provide a single customer view (or single view of any other entity) of the overall data. Unlike the traditional extract, transform, load ("ETL") process, the data remains in place, and real-time access is given to the source system for the data.
Database indexA database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data without having to search every row in a database table every time said table is accessed. Indexes can be created using one or more columns of a database table, providing the basis for both rapid random lookups and efficient access of ordered records.
Semantic heterogeneitySemantic heterogeneity is when database schema or datasets for the same domain are developed by independent parties, resulting in differences in meaning and interpretation of data values. Beyond structured data, the problem of semantic heterogeneity is compounded due to the flexibility of semi-structured data and various tagging methods applied to documents or unstructured data. Semantic heterogeneity is one of the more important sources of differences in heterogeneous datasets.
Fact tableIn data warehousing, a fact table consists of the measurements, metrics or facts of a business process. It is located at the center of a star schema or a snowflake schema surrounded by dimension tables. Where multiple fact tables are used, these are arranged as a fact constellation schema. A fact table typically has two types of columns: those that contain facts and those that are a foreign key to dimension tables. The primary key of a fact table is usually a composite key that is made up of all of its foreign keys.
Join (SQL)A join clause in the Structured Query Language (SQL) combines columns from one or more tables into a new table. The operation corresponds to a join operation in relational algebra. Informally, a join stitches two tables and puts on the same row records with matching fields : INNER, LEFT OUTER, RIGHT OUTER, FULL OUTER and CROSS. To explain join types, the rest of this article uses the following tables: Department.DepartmentID is the primary key of the Department table, whereas Employee.DepartmentID is a foreign key.
Enterprise integrationEnterprise integration is a technical field of enterprise architecture, which is focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments. It is a concept in enterprise engineering to provide the relevant information and thereby enable communication between people, machines and computers and their efficient co-operation and co-ordination.
Enterprise information integrationEnterprise information integration (EII) is the ability to support an unified view of data and information for an entire organization. In a data virtualization application of EII, a process of information integration, using data abstraction to provide a unified interface (known as uniform data access) for viewing all the data within an organization, and a single set of structures and naming conventions (known as uniform information representation) to represent this data; the goal of EII is to get a large set of heterogeneous data sources to appear to a user or system as a single, homogeneous data source.
Query planA query plan (or query execution plan) is a sequence of steps used to access data in a SQL relational database management system. This is a specific case of the relational model concept of access plans. Since SQL is declarative, there are typically many alternative ways to execute a given query, with widely varying performance. When a query is submitted to the database, the query optimizer evaluates some of the different, correct possible plans for executing the query and returns what it considers the best option.
MetadataMetadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: Descriptive metadata – the descriptive information about a resource. It is used for discovery and identification. It includes elements such as title, abstract, author, and keywords. Structural metadata – metadata about containers of data and indicates how compound objects are put together, for example, how pages are ordered to form chapters.
Sort-merge joinThe sort-merge join (also known as merge join) is a join algorithm and is used in the implementation of a relational database management system. The basic problem of a join algorithm is to find, for each distinct value of the join attribute, the set of tuples in each relation which display that value. The key idea of the sort-merge algorithm is to first sort the relations by the join attribute, so that interleaved linear scans will encounter these sets at the same time.
Semantic technologyThe ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.
Data wranglingData wrangling, sometimes referred to as data munging, is the process of transforming and mapping data from one "raw" data form into another format with the intent of making it more appropriate and valuable for a variety of downstream purposes such as analytics. The goal of data wrangling is to assure quality and useful data. Data analysts typically spend the majority of their time in the process of data wrangling compared to the actual analysis of the data.
Metadata standardA metadata standard is a requirement which is intended to establish a common understanding of the meaning or semantics of the data, to ensure correct and proper use and interpretation of the data by its owners and users. To achieve this common understanding, a number of characteristics, or attributes of the data have to be defined, also known as metadata. Metadata is often defined as data about data.
Decision support systemA decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher management) and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e. unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Query languageA query language, also known as data query language or database query language (DQL), is a computer language used to make queries in databases and information systems. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL). Broadly, query languages can be classified according to whether they are database query languages or information retrieval query languages. The difference is that a database query language attempts to give factual answers to factual questions, while an information retrieval query language attempts to find documents containing information that is relevant to an area of inquiry.
Metadata registryA metadata registry is a central location in an organization where metadata definitions are stored and maintained in a controlled method. A metadata repository is the database where metadata is stored. The registry also adds relationships with related metadata types. A metadata engine collects, stores and analyzes information about data and metadata (data about data) in use within a domain. Metadata registries are used whenever data must be used consistently within an organization or group of organizations.
