Storage Strategies in Data Warehouses

A data warehouse stores and manages historical data for on-line analytical processing, rather than for on-line transactional processing. Data warehouses with sizes ranging from gigabytes to terabytes are common, and they are much larger than operational databases. Data warehouse users tend to be more interested in identifying business trends rather than individual values. Queries for identifying business trends are called analytical queries. These queries invariably require data aggregation, usually according to many different groupings. Analytical queries are thus much more complex than transactional ones. The complexity of analytical queries combined with the immense size of data can easily result in unacceptably long response times. Effective approaches to improving query performance are crucial to a proper physical design of data warehouses.