Best Practices in Data Warehousing
The Data Warehouse Institute (2007). Best Practices
Awards 2007.
KEY TERMS
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information
Interchange. Serves a code for representing English
characters as numbers with each letter assigned a
number from 0 to 127.
Data Warehousing: A compilation of data designed
to for decision support by executives, managers, analysts
and other key stakeholders in an organization. A data
warehouse contains a consistent picture of business
conditions at a single point in time.
Database: A collection of facts, figures, and objects
that is structured so that it can easily be accessed, or-
ganized, managed, and updated.
Enterprise Architecture: A business and per-
formance-based framework to support cross-agency
collaboration, transformation, and organization-wide
improvement.
Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL): A
key transitional set of steps in migrating data from the
source systems to the database housing the data ware-
house. Extraction refers to drawing out the data from
the source system, transformation concerns converting
the data to the format of the warehouse and loading
involves storing the data into the warehouse.
Geographic Information Systems: Map-based
tools used to gather, transform, manipulate, analyze,
and produce information related to the surface of the
Earth.

Hierarchical Data Files: Database systems that are
organized in the shape of a pyramid with each row of
objects linked to objects directly beneath it. This ap-
proach has generally been superceded by relationship
database systems.
Knowledge Management: A concept where an
organization deliberately and comprehensively gathers,
organizes, and analyzes its knowledge, then shares it
internally and sometimes externally.
Legacy System: Typically, a database management
system in which an organization has invested consider-
able time and money and resides on a mainframe or
minicomputer.
Outsourcing: Acquiring services or products from
an outside supplier or manufacturer in order to cut costs
and/or procure outside expertise.
Performance Metrics: Key measurements of
system attributes that is used to determine the success
of the process.
Pivot Tables: An interactive table found in most
spreadsheet programs that quickly combines and com-
pares typically large amounts of data. One can rotate
its rows and columns to see different arrangements of
the source data, and also display the details for areas
of interest.
Terabyte: A unit of memory or data storage capacity
equal to roughly 1,000 gigabytes.
Total Cost of Ownership: Developed by Gartner
Group, an accounting method used by organizations
seeking to identify their both direct and indirect sys-
tems costs.