A Data Warehouse is a database-centric system of decision support technologies used to consolidate business data from many disparate sources for use in reporting and analysis (Data Warehouse). Data warehouses and data warehouse systems are mainly used by server executives, senior executives and business analysts with accurate and consolidated information from various internal and external sources to facilitate the process of making complex business decisions (data warehouse process). The term data warehouse was first coined by Bill Inmon, commonly recognized as the "father of data warehousing" and is the leading proponent of the normalized, or sometimes referred to as top-down, approach to data warehouse design (Reed, M.)( Data Warehouse). In this Data Warehouse model, all organizational data is collected from source systems at the lowest level of detail, known as "atomic" data, and stored in the Data Warehouse. This data is then grouped into subsets of the original transactional systems based on model-specific business processes known as data marts (for example, a marketing data mart might contain all of the entire organization's data related to the marketing department). This design allows for great consistency across business processes because all organizational information is loaded into the Data Warehouse at the same time, and all data is linked by common dimensions (the data that gives transactions their context, such as customers (dimension) to purchases ( transactions) or from employee (size) to sales (transactions)). However, since the scope of this design includes all organizational data, which requires the need to model, develop and deploy the solution as a whole, the result is a significant i...... middle of paper... .. .esearch/articles/a-definition-of-data-warehousing-16730/ >“Extract, Transform, Load” Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation, 2011. Web. 30 November 2011Shaik, Sadip "ETL Architecture and Business Models" sadiqblog. com Exploring Analytics 28Feb. 2008. Web. November 30, 2011Bowman, David “Data Warehouse Basics” information-management-architect.com Information Management Checklist by DavidBowman 2009. Web. November 30, 2011 “What is a Data Mart” learn.geekinterview.com GeekInterview January 13, 2008. Web. November 30, 2011< http://www.learn.geekinterview.com/data-warehouse/data-marts/what-is-data -mart.html>“Data Warehousing Basics” amar-padhi.com amar on June 5, 2009. Diagram. December 2, 2011< http://www.amar-padhi.com/oradb_dw_basics.html>