| Since data warehouses are targeted for decision support applications which often require fast response time to a variety of OLAP queries over vast amount of data, performance (which is indicated by query throughput and response time) on a data warehouse is important. High performance is often achieved through special software or hardware architecture, or the database tuning techniques. Decision support usually requires consolidating data from many heterogeneous sources, and provides on-line analytical processing power to different users, data warehouse must be implemented in such a way to facilitate the decision support. Data warehouse might be implemented on relational OLAP server, on multidimensional OLAP server, or on hybrid OLAP server.; In this study, we will look at the structure and functionality of the data warehousing. As part of the data warehouse architecture, OLAP server is used to change data into useful information to support the on-line analytical processing. The architecture and functionality of different kind of OLAP server will also be studied in this study. We focus our study on the performance evaluation of two kinds of software for the management of the data warehouse: Oracle8 and Oracle Express. |
