Building data warehouses with incremental maintenance for decision support

Data warehousing is an emerging technology that facilitates gathering and integrating heterogeneous data from distributed sources and extracting information that can be utilized as a knowledge base for decision support. Once a data warehouse is built, we need to maintain it consistent with the underlying data sources, which always subject to dynamic updates. Much work has been done on manipulating and mining data warehouses. However, most of the published works pay no attention to the issue of building a complete data warehouse from scratch, and employing it as a crucial technique to support the decision making process. In this paper, we exhibit a comprehensive case study, based on utilizing a ready-made commercial database for designing and implementing a data warehouse (DW) with incremental maintenance capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate the process of employing the constructed data warehouse as a decision support tool to provide the management with accurate, precise, and quick information, upon which decisions can be made