Resumen
This article reports on the architectural advantages of data warehousing in large retail, banking and telecommunications corporations. By the mid 1980's major corporations began building their own data warehouses. Driving this development, were business needs arising from such changes as fragmentation of mass markets into micro segments with special needs and the introduction of specialized technology by IBM Corp. and Teradata Corp. In the early 1990's, more data warehousing tools became available and data warehousing became one of the hottest developments in the corporate computing world. Today, most large organizations either have built a data warehouse or are at least seriously thinking about doing so. The fundamental reason for building a data warehouse is to improve the quality of information in the organization. Data warehousing implementation challenges include a complex array of hardware and software components with highly specialized capabilities, such as symmetric multiprocessing, multidimensional databases and data extraction and cleansing tools. Although, companies may reap benefits at first, the direction of data warehousing can veer off course over time and momentum can lag without the continued investment of time from the business side.