Data Warehouses Versus Operational Systems
Operational systems are optimized for preservation of data integrity and speed of recording of business transactions through use of database normalization and an entity-relationship model. Operational system designers generally follow the Codd rules of database normalization in order to ensure data integrity. Codd defined five increasingly stringent rules of normalization. Fully normalized database designs (that is, those satisfying all five Codd rules) often result in information from a business transaction being stored in dozens to hundreds of tables. Relational databases are efficient at managing the relationships between these tables. The databases have very fast insert/update performance because only a small amount of data in those tables is affected each time a transaction is processed. Finally, in order to improve performance, older data are usually periodically purged from operational systems.
Read more about this topic: Data Warehouse
Famous quotes containing the words data and/or systems:
“This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)