Data warehousing

Document description

This paper is a discussion of data warehousing with an emphasis on actuarial and business approaches. The main section is an introduction to the concepts of warehousing and its business implications. The benefits and risks are discussed, along with the practical issues of structuring a warehousing project. Some guidelines for a successful warehousing project are suggested. To give some perspective, there is a short appendix with the history of one company's warehousing project. A further three appendices are provided to give a full technical discussion of the IT issues in warehousing. These cover data models, some examples of these applied to retail and insurance, and a discussion of user tools. A number of warehouse projects fail because of inappropriate choices of data models and user tools. These appendices, although technical, are intended to provide insight into why these failures occur.