Information Technology (IT) Tools and Techniques
...d for the volume and the merchants that accounted for the greatest volume. By determining the spending patterns in precise locations of the country, an analyst can appropriately tailor his/her marketing promotions. OLAP is achieved through the use of an OLAP Server in a multi-user client/server environment providing a consistent, fast response to user inquires, regardless of database size and complexity. OLAP helps users analyze enterprise information through relative, custom viewing, as well as allowing the user to perform a variety of "what-if" data model scenarios to project future outcomes based on historical information. OLAP can be used for data mining or the identification of data relationships that haven’t been previously discovered and understood. Data Warehouse and Data Mart A data warehouse is a central storage area for all significant data that an enterprise's various business organizations collect. Data from operational, external, and other enterprise databases are selectively extracted and methodically organized in the data warehouse database for analytical processing and other forms of analysis, research, and decision support. A data mart is a subdivision of a data warehouse that supports a specific group of people or business department. The emphasis of a data mart is on meeting the specific demands of a particular group of users in terms of analysis, content, and presentation. Data mart users can expect to have data presented in terms they are familiar with. Many people believe the design of a data mart starts from an analysis of user needs and that a data warehouse starts from an analysis of what data exists in the enterprise and how it can be collected in such a way so that it can be used effectively down the road. A data warehouse is a central aggregation of data whereas a data mart is a data repository that is normally derived from a data warehouse that emphasizes ease of access and usability for a particular purpose. In general, a data warehouse tends to be a strategic but somewhat unfinished initiative; a data mart tends to be a completed venture aimed at meeting an immediate need (SearchTechTarget, 2003). Three-tier Architecture The three-tier architecture came about to overcome the limitations of the two-tier architecture. The third tier (i.e., the middle tier) is between the user (client) and the data management (server) devices. The middle tier provides for execution of business logic and rules and is able to support many udders (more so than the two-tier architecture) by providing functions such as queuing, application execution, and database staging. The three tier architecture is used when an effective distributed client/server design is needed that provides (when compared to the two-tier) increased performance, flexibility, maintainability, reusability, and scalability, while hiding the complexity of distributed processing from the user (Carnegie Mellon, 2000). ASP Active Server Pages (ASP) is a technology that al...