Only warehoused data can truly ensure the success of these types of applications. The maintenance burden on legacy systems, which are now expected to provide a greater variety of information to users, has become daunting. The task of merging business systems has become more frequent, intricate and delicate. The need to provide information for supporting decision making throughout the organization demands re-thinking traditional data management strategies. The need to analyze business performance at all levels in the organization requires a deeper, broader base of information to do so, taking care not to disrupt production systems.
Data warehousing is a hot topic for many reasons.