ABSTRACT
Introduction A data warehouse expresses the enterprise through its data. An enterprise can be any organization capable of funding, owning and operating a data warehouse, including a corporation, educational institution, department or extremely solvent individual. A data warehouse expresses an enterprise, much like a mirror expresses a reflection, by reflecting the subject areas, entities, attributes and processes of that enterprise by the data structures in the data warehouse and the data which is integrated into those data structures. Applications retrieve data from the enterprise and load this data into a data warehouse. That expression of the enterprise, therefore, begins within the enterprise; begins with the data within the enterprise. To express the enterprise via a data warehouse, a data warehouse designer must understand the enterprise, its environment, processes, and the data within the enterprise as well as the data surrounding the enterprise.
