Three concepts should be evaluated in terms of their usability for decision support and relationship to the so-called ‘real data warehouse.’ They are:

• Virtual data warehouse
• Multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP)
• Relational OLAP.

Virtual Data Warehouse

The virtual data warehouse promises to deliver the same benefits as a real data warehouse but without the associated amount of work and difficulty. The virtual data warehouse concept can be subdivided into the surround data warehouse and the OLAP/data mart warehouse. In a surround data warehouse, legacy systems are ‘surrounded’ with methods to access data without a fundamental change of the operational data. The surround concept negates a key feature of the real data warehouse, which integrates operational data in a way that allows users to use it to meet business analysis objectives.

The data structure of a virtual data warehouse does not lend itself to DSS processing. Legacy operational systems were built to ease updating, writing and deleting and not with simple data extraction in mind. As well, there is a minimal amount of stored historical data. A real data warehouse with its two-to-five years of stored data, provides a far superior means of analyzing trends.

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