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Week 7: Database and Data Warehouse

Module 7: Database and Data Warehouse

Objectives
After completing this chapter, students will be able to:
1. Describe the differences between data, information, and knowledge;
2. Define the term database and identify the steps to creating one;
3. Describe the role of a database management system;
4. Describe the characteristics of a data warehouse; and
5. Define data mining and describe its role in an organization.

Introduction

You have already been introduced to the first two components of information systems:
hardware and software. However, those two components by themselves do not make a
computer useful. Imagine if you turned on a computer, started the word processor, but could
not save a document. Imagine if you opened a music player but there was no music to play.
Imagine opening a web browser but there were no web pages. Without data, hardware and
software are not very useful! Data is the third component of an information system.

Data, Information, and Knowledge

Data are the raw bits and pieces of information with no context. If I told you, “15, 23, 14, 85,”
you would not have learned anything. But I would have given you data.

Data can be quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative data is numeric, the result of a

measurement, count, or some other mathematical calculation. Qualitative data is
descriptive. “Ruby Red,” the color of a 2013 Ford Focus, is an example of qualitative data. A
number can be qualitative too: if I tell you my favorite number is 5, that is qualitative data
because it is descriptive, not the result of a measurement or mathematical calculation.

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By itself, data is not that useful. To be useful, it needs to be given context. Returning to the
example above, if I told you that “15, 23, 14, and 85″ are the numbers of students that had
registered for upcoming classes, that would be information. By adding the context – that the
numbers represent the count of students registering for specific classes – I have converted
data into information.

Once we have put our data into context, aggregated and analyzed it, we can use it to make
decisions for our organization. We can say that this consumption of information
produces knowledge. This knowledge can be used to make decisions, set policies, and even
spark innovation.

The final step up the information ladder is the step from knowledge (knowing a lot about a
topic) to wisdom. We can say that someone has wisdom when they can combine their
knowledge and experience to produce a deeper understanding of a topic. It often takes many
years to develop wisdom on a particular topic, and requires patience.

Examples of Data

Almost all software programs require data to do anything useful. For example, if you are
editing a document in a word processor such as Microsoft Word, the document you are
working on is the data. The word-processing software can manipulate the data: create a new
document, duplicate a document, or modify a document. Some other examples of data are:
an MP3 music file, a video file, a spreadsheet, a web page, and an e-book. In some cases, such
as with an e-book, you may only have the ability to read the data.

Databases

The goal of many information systems is to transform data into information in order to
generate knowledge that can be used for decision making. In order to do this, the system
must be able to take data, put the data into context, and provide tools for aggregation and
analysis. A database is designed for just such a purpose.

A database is an organized collection of related information. It is an organized collection,

because in a database, all data is described and associated with other data. All information
in a database should be related as well; separate databases should be created to manage
unrelated information. For example, a database that contains information about students
should not also hold information about company stock prices. Databases are not always
digital – a filing cabinet, for instance, might be considered a form of database. For the
purposes of this text, we will only consider digital databases.

Relational Databases

Databases can be organized in many different ways, and thus take many forms. The most
popular form of database today is the relational database. Popular examples of relational
databases are Microsoft Access, MySQL, and Oracle. A relational database is one in which
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data is organized into one or more tables. Each table has a set of fields, which define the
nature of the data stored in the table. A record is one instance of a set of fields in a table. To
visualize this, think of the records as the rows of the table and the fields as the columns of
the table. In the example below, we have a table of student information, with each row
representing a student and each column representing one piece of information about the
student.

In a relational database, all the tables are related by one or more fields, so that it is possible
to connect all the tables in the database through the field(s) they have in common. For each
table, one of the fields is identified as a primary key. This key is the unique identifier for each
record in the table. To help you understand these terms further, let’s walk through the
process of designing a database.

Designing a Database

Suppose a university wants to create an information system to track participation in student

clubs. After interviewing several people, the design team learns that the goal of
implementing the system is to give better insight into how the university funds clubs. This
will be accomplished by tracking how many members each club has and how active the clubs
are. From this, the team decides that the system must keep track of the clubs, their members,
and their events. Using this information, the design team determines that the following
tables need to be created:

 Clubs: this will track the club name, the club president, and a short description of
the club.
 Students: student name, e-mail, and year of birth.
 Memberships: this table will correlate students with clubs, allowing us to have any
given student join multiple clubs.
 Events: this table will track when the clubs meet and how many students showed
up.

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Now that the design team has determined which tables to create, they need to define the
specific information that each table will hold. This requires identifying the fields that will be
in each table. For example, Club Name would be one of the fields in the Clubs table. First
Name and Last Name would be fields in the Students table. Finally, since this will be a
relational database, every table should have a field in common with at least one other table
(in other words: they should have a relationship with each other).

In order to properly create this relationship, a primary key must be selected for each table.
This key is a unique identifier for each record in the table. For example, in the Students table,
it might be possible to use students’ last name as a way to uniquely identify them. However,
it is more than likely that some students will share a last name (like Rodriguez, Smith, or
Lee), so a different field should be selected. A student’s e-mail address might be a good choice
for a primary key, since e-mail addresses are unique. However, a primary key cannot change,
so this would mean that if students changed their e-mail address we would have to remove
them from the database and then re-insert them – not an attractive proposition. Our solution
is to create a value for each student — a user ID — that will act as a primary key. We will also
do this for each of the student clubs. This solution is quite common and is the reason you
have so many user IDs!
You can see the final database design in the figure below:

With this design, not only do we have a way to organize all of the information we need to
meet the requirements, but we have also successfully related all the tables together. Here’s
what the database tables might look like with some sample data. Note that the
Memberships table has the sole purpose of allowing us to relate multiple students to
multiple clubs.
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Normalization

When designing a database, one important concept to understand is normalization. In simple

terms, to normalize a database means to design it in a way that: 1) reduces duplication of
data between tables and 2) gives the table as much flexibility as possible.

In the Student Clubs database design, the design team worked to achieve these objectives.
For example, to track memberships, a simple solution might have been to create a Members
field in the Clubs table and then just list the names of all of the members there. However, this
design would mean that if a student joined two clubs, then his or her information would have
to be entered a second time. Instead, the designers solved this problem by using two tables:
Students and Memberships.

In this design, when a student joins their first club, we first must add the student to the
Students table, where their first name, last name, e-mail address, and birth year are entered.
This addition to the Students table will generate a student ID. Now we will add a new entry
to denote that the student is a member of a specific club. This is accomplished by adding a
record with the student ID and the club ID in the Memberships table. If this student joins a
second club, we do not have to duplicate the entry of the student’s name, e-mail, and birth
year; instead, we only need to make another entry in the Memberships table of the second
club’s ID and the student’s ID.

The design of the Student Clubs database also makes it simple to change the design without
major modifications to the existing structure. For example, if the design team were asked to
add functionality to the system to track faculty advisors to the clubs, we could easily
accomplish this by adding a Faculty Advisors table (similar to the Students table) and then
adding a new field to the Clubs table to hold the Faculty Advisor ID.

Data Types

When defining the fields in a database table, we must give each field a data type. For example,
the field Birth Year is a year, so it will be a number, while First Name will be text. Most
modern databases allow for several different data types to be stored. Some of the more
common data types are listed here:

 Text: for storing non-numeric data that is brief, generally under 256 characters. The
database designer can identify the maximum length of the text.
 Number: for storing numbers. There are usually a few different number types that
can be selected, depending on how large the largest number will be.
 Yes/No: a special form of the number data type that is (usually) one byte long, with a
0 for “No” or “False” and a 1 for “Yes” or “True”.
 Date/Time: a special form of the number data type that can be interpreted as a
number or a time.
 Currency: a special form of the number data type that formats all values with a
currency indicator and two decimal places.
 Paragraph Text: this data type allows for text longer than 256 characters.
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 Object: this data type allows for the storage of data that cannot be entered via
keyboard, such as an image or a music file.

There are two important reasons that we must properly define the data type of a field. First,
a data type tells the database what functions can be performed with the data. For example, if
we wish to perform mathematical functions with one of the fields, we must be sure to tell the
database that the field is a number data type. So if we have, say, a field storing birth year, we
can subtract the number stored in that field from the current year to get age.

The second important reason to define data type is so that the proper amount of storage
space is allocated for our data. For example, if the First Name field is defined as a text(50)
data type, this means fifty characters are allocated for each first name we want to store.
However, even if the first name is only five characters long, fifty characters (bytes) will be
allocated. While this may not seem like a big deal, if our table ends up holding 50,000 names,
we are allocating 50 * 50,000 = 2,500,000 bytes for storage of these values. It may be prudent
to reduce the size of the field so we do not waste storage space.

The Difference between a Database and a Spreadsheet

Many times, when introducing the concept of databases to students, they quickly decide that
a database is pretty much the same as a spreadsheet. After all, a spreadsheet stores data in
an organized fashion, using rows and columns, and looks very similar to a database table.
This misunderstanding extends beyond the classroom: spreadsheets are used as a substitute
for databases in all types of situations every day, all over the world.

To be fair, for simple uses, a spreadsheet can substitute for a database quite well. If a simple
listing of rows and columns (a single table) is all that is needed, then creating a database is
probably overkill. In our Student Clubs example, if we only needed to track a listing of clubs,
the number of members, and the contact information for the president, we could get away
with a single spreadsheet. However, the need to include a listing of events and the names of
members would be problematic if tracked with a spreadsheet.

When several types of data must be mixed together, or when the relationships between these
types of data are complex, then a spreadsheet is not the best solution. A database allows data
from several entities (such as students, clubs, memberships, and events) to all be related
together into one whole. While a spreadsheet does allow you to define what kinds of values
can be entered into its cells, a database provides more intuitive and powerful ways to define
the types of data that go into each field, reducing possible errors and allowing for easier
analysis.

Though not good for replacing databases, spreadsheets can be ideal tools for analyzing the
data stored in a database. A spreadsheet package can be connected to a specific table or
query in a database and used to create charts or perform analysis on that data.

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Structured Query Language

Once you have a database designed and loaded with data, how will you do something useful
with it? The primary way to work with a relational database is to use Structured Query
Language, SQL (pronounced “sequel,” or simply stated as S-Q-L). Almost all applications that
work with databases (such as database management systems, discussed below) make use of
SQL as a way to analyze and manipulate relational data. As its name implies, SQL is a language
that can be used to work with a relational database. From a simple request for data to a
complex update operation, SQL is a mainstay of programmers and database administrators.
To give you a taste of what SQL might look like, here are a couple of examples using our
Student Clubs database.

An in-depth description of how SQL works is beyond the scope of this introductory text, but
these examples should give you an idea of the power of using SQL to manipulate relational
data. Many database packages, such as Microsoft Access, allow you to visually create the
query you want to construct and then generate the SQL query for you.

Other Types of Databases

The relational database model is the most used database model today. However, many other
database models exist that provide different strengths than the relational model. The
hierarchical database model, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, connected data together in a
hierarchy, allowing for a parent/child relationship between data. The document-centric
model allowed for a more unstructured data storage by placing data into “documents” that
could then be manipulated.

Perhaps the most interesting new development is the concept of NoSQL (from the phrase
“not only SQL”). NoSQL arose from the need to solve the problem of large-scale databases
spread over several servers or even across the world. For a relational database to work
properly, it is important that only one person be able to manipulate a piece of data at a time,
a concept known as record-locking. But with today’s large-scale databases (think Google and
Amazon), this is just not possible. A NoSQL database can work with data in a looser way,
allowing for a more unstructured environment, communicating changes to the data over
time to all the servers that are part of the database.
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Database Management Systems

To the computer, a database looks like one or more files. In order for the data in the database
to be read, changed, added, or removed, a software program must access it. Many software
applications have this ability: iTunes can read its database to give you a listing of its songs
(and play the songs); your mobile-phone software can interact with your list of contacts. But
what about applications to create or manage a database? What software can you use to create
a database, change a database’s structure, or simply do analysis? That is the purpose of a
category of software applications called database management systems (DBMS).

DBMS packages generally provide an interface to view and change the design of the database,
create queries, and develop reports. Most of these packages are designed to work with a
specific type of database, but generally are compatible with a wide range of databases.

For example, Apache OpenOffice.org Base (see screen shot) can be used to create, modify,
and analyze databases in open-database (ODB) format. Microsoft’s Access DBMS is used to
work with databases in its own Microsoft Access Database format. Both Access and Base
have the ability to read and write to other database formats as well.

Microsoft Access and Open Office Base are examples of personal database-management
systems. These systems are primarily used to develop and analyze single-user databases.
These databases are not meant to be shared across a network or the Internet, but are instead
installed on a particular device and work with a single user at a time.

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Enterprise Databases

A database that can only be used by a single user at a time is not going to meet the needs of
most organizations. As computers have become networked and are now joined worldwide
via the Internet, a class of database has emerged that can be accessed by two, ten, or even a
million people. These databases are sometimes installed on a single computer to be accessed
by a group of people at a single location. Other times, they are installed over several servers
worldwide, meant to be accessed by millions. These relational enterprise database packages
are built and supported by companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. The open-source
MySQL is also an enterprise database.

As stated earlier, the relational database model does not scale well. The term scale here
refers to a database getting larger and larger, being distributed on a larger number of
computers connected via a network. Some companies are looking to provide large-scale
database solutions by moving away from the relational model to other, more flexible models.
For example, Google now offers the App Engine Datastore, which is based on NoSQL.
Developers can use the App Engine Datastore to develop applications that access data from
anywhere in the world. Amazon.com offers several database services for enterprise use,
including Amazon RDS, which is a relational database service, and Amazon DynamoDB, a
NoSQL enterprise solution.

Big Data

A new buzzword that has been capturing the attention of businesses lately is big data. The
term refers to such massively large data sets that conventional database tools do not have
the processing power to analyze them. For example, Walmart must process over one million
customer transactions every hour. Storing and analyzing that much data is beyond the power
of traditional database-management tools. Understanding the best tools and techniques to
manage and analyze these large data sets is a problem that governments and businesses alike
are trying to solve.

What Is Metadata?

The term metadata can be understood as “data about data.” For example, when looking at
one of the values of Year of Birth in the Students table, the data itself may be “1992”. The
metadata about that value would be the field name Year of Birth, the time it was last updated,
and the data type (integer). Another example of metadata could be for an MP3 music file, like
the one shown in the image below; information such as the length of the song, the artist, the
album, the file size, and even the album cover art, are classified as metadata. When a database
is being designed, a “data dictionary” is created to hold the metadata, defining the fields and
structure of the database.
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Metadata about a camera image (Public Domain)

Data Warehouse

As organizations have begun to utilize databases as the centerpiece of their operations, the
need to fully understand and leverage the data they are collecting has become more and
more apparent. However, directly analyzing the data that is needed for day-to-day
operations is not a good idea; we do not want to tax the operations of the company more
than we need to. Further, organizations also want to analyze data in a historical sense: How
does the data we have today compare with the same set of data this time last month, or last
year? From these needs arose the concept of the data warehouse.

The concept of the data warehouse is simple: extract data from one or more of the
organization’s databases and load it into the data warehouse (which is itself another
database) for storage and analysis. However, the execution of this concept is not that simple.
A data warehouse should be designed so that it meets the following criteria:

 It uses non-operational data. This means that the data warehouse is using a copy of
data from the active databases that the company uses in its day-to-day operations, so
the data warehouse must pull data from the existing databases on a regular,
scheduled basis.
 The data is time-variant. This means that whenever data is loaded into the data
warehouse, it receives a time stamp, which allows for comparisons between different
time periods.
 The data is standardized. Because the data in a data warehouse usually comes from
several different sources, it is possible that the data does not use the same definitions
or units. For example, our Events table in our Student Clubs database lists the event
dates using the mm/dd/yyyy format (e.g., 01/10/2013). A table in another database
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might use the format yy/mm/dd (e.g., 13/01/10) for dates. In order for the data
warehouse to match up dates, a standard date format would have to be agreed upon
and all data loaded into the data warehouse would have to be converted to use this
standard format. This process is called extraction-transformation-load (ETL).

There are two primary schools of thought when designing a data warehouse: bottom-up and
top-down. The bottom-up approach starts by creating small data warehouses, called data
marts, to solve specific business problems. As these data marts are created, they can be
combined into a larger data warehouse. The top-down approach suggests that we should
start by creating an enterprise-wide data warehouse and then, as specific business needs are
identified, create smaller data marts from the data warehouse.

Benefits of Data Warehouses

Organizations find data warehouses quite beneficial for a number of reasons:

 The process of developing a data warehouse forces an organization to better

understand the data that it is currently collecting and, equally important, what data is
not being collected.
 A data warehouse provides a centralized view of all data being collected across the
enterprise and provides a means for determining data that is inconsistent.
 Once all data is identified as consistent, an organization can generate one version of the
truth. This is important when the company wants to report consistent statistics about
itself, such as revenue or number of employees.
 By having a data warehouse, snapshots of data can be taken over time. This creates a
historical record of data, which allows for an analysis of trends.
 A data warehouse provides tools to combine data, which can provide new information
and analysis.

Data Mining

Data mining is the process of analyzing data to find previously unknown trends, patterns,
and associations in order to make decisions. Generally, data mining is accomplished through
automated means against extremely large data sets, such as a data warehouse. Some
examples of data mining include:
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 An analysis of sales from a large grocery chain might determine that milk is purchased
more frequently the day after it rains in cities with a population of less than 50,000.
 A bank may find that loan applicants whose bank accounts show particular deposit and
withdrawal patterns are not good credit risks.
 A baseball team may find that collegiate baseball players with specific statistics in
hitting, pitching, and fielding make for more successful major league players.

In some cases, a data-mining project is begun with a hypothetical result in mind. For
example, a grocery chain may already have some idea that buying patterns change after it
rains and want to get a deeper understanding of exactly what is happening. In other cases,
there are no presuppositions and a data-mining program is run against large data sets in
order to find patterns and associations.

Privacy Concerns

The increasing power of data mining has caused concerns for many, especially in the area of
privacy. In today’s digital world, it is becoming easier than ever to take data from disparate
sources and combine them to do new forms of analysis. In fact, a whole industry has sprung
up around this technology: data brokers. These firms combine publicly accessible data with
information obtained from the government and other sources to create vast warehouses of
data about people and companies that they can then sell. This subject will be covered in much
more detail in chapter 12 – the chapter on the ethical concerns of information systems.

Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

With tools such as data warehousing and data mining at their disposal, businesses are
learning how to use information to their advantage. The term business intelligence is used to
describe the process that organizations use to take data they are collecting and analyze it in
the hopes of obtaining a competitive advantage. Besides using data from their internal
databases, firms often purchase information from data brokers to get a big-picture
understanding of their industries. Business analytics is the term used to describe the use of
internal company data to improve business processes and practices.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the role that data and databases play in the context of
information systems. Data is made up of small facts and information without context. If you
give data context, then you have information. Knowledge is gained when information is
consumed and used for decision making. A database is an organized collection of related
information. Relational databases are the most widely used type of database, where data is
structured into tables and all tables must be related to each other through unique identifiers.
A database management system (DBMS) is a software application that is used to create and
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manage databases, and can take the form of a personal DBMS, used by one person, or an
enterprise DBMS that can be used by multiple users. A data warehouse is a special form of
database that takes data from other databases in an enterprise and organizes it for analysis.
Data mining is the process of looking for patterns and relationships in large data sets. Many
businesses use databases, data warehouses, and data-mining techniques in order to produce
business intelligence and gain a competitive advantage.

References and Supplementary Materials

Books and Journals
1. Aiden Black (Editor) (2018) Information Management: Systems and Processes
2. Records and Information Management. Patricia C. Franks – 2018
3. Fundamentals of Information Systems. Ralph Stair, George Reynolds - 2017 .
4. Mobile Networks and Management Hu, J. (Ed), Khalil, I. (Ed), Tari, Z. (Ed), Wen, S. (Ed)
(2018)
5. Information Management and Big Data Lossio-Ventura, J. A. (Ed), Alatrista-Salas, H.
(Ed) (2018)
6. MIS Hossein Bidgoli – 2017
Online Supplementary Reading Materials
1. Data Warehouse Architecture, Concepts and Components;
https://www.guru99.com/data-warehouse-architecture.html; November 26, 2019
2. Ben Linders (January 28, 2016). "How Database Administration Fits into DevOps".
Retrieved April 15, 2017; November 26, 2019
3. "Oracle 30th Anniversary Timeline" (PDF). Retrieved 23 August 2017; November 26,
2019