data-architecture-a

Fig. 12.1.4 Very little historical data found in the operational environment.

But there is a problem with jettisoning historical data. That problem is that historical data
are useful for many purposes. Historical data are useful in the following:

Spotting and measuring trends

Understanding the long-term habits of customers

Looking at developing patterns

And so forth

Because of the lack of integrity of data and because of the need to have a place to house
historical data, there arose a need for a different kind of architectural structure than the
operational application. Because of the need to do analytic processing (as opposed to
transactional processing), there appeared in the world a structure called the “data
warehouse.”

Fig. 12.1.5 shows the emergence of the data warehouse.

Chapter 12.1: Operational Analytics