ABSTRACT
Decision support systems (DSSs) are rapidly becoming a key to gaining competitive advantage for businesses. DSSs allow businesses to retrieve data locked away in operational databases and transform that data into useful information or knowledge. Many corporations have built or are building unified decision-support databases, usually referred to as data warehouses, on which intelligent data analysis can be carried out. According to a popular definition, a data warehouse is a “subject-oriented, integrated, time-varying, nonvolatile collection of data that is used primarily in organizational decision making” (Inmon, 1996). Data warehousing provides an effective approach to dealing with complex decision support queries over data from multiple sites.
