A data warehousing approach Michael H. Granof, The Government Accountants Journal , Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp.30-38. It is the position of the author that the standards ought to be designed to take advantage of technological advances such as data warehouses or similar data bases to enable governmental entities to provide more and better information in a form designated by individual users. He further maintains that by the time the new standards go into effect and agencies must comply, the cost of commercial data bases and report software will be within the financial means of even the smaller entities.
Data warehousing is a means of facilitating reporting.
The warehouses are electronic repositories for combining and storing information from different sources including mainframe databases, client-server relational databases, and spreadsheets and text reports. These warehouses permit the access of raw data as well as the synthesizing and aggregating of data to produce a wide variety of reports. They can also be used to determine trends in support of decision making. Data warehouses can be accessed through the Internet. This opens them up to the various constituencies to whom the agency or office is responsible.