These systems can be complex, with thousands of tables and 10s or 100s of thousands of columns. You must understand the organization the data and provide a mechanism for navigating that data so that can be efficiently accessed by your ETL process. Metadata Metadata is the lifeblood of your data warehouse. The metadata supports the understanding, navigation, and use of the data that is accessible through your warehouse. Without metadata, the data resources of your organization will be under utilized, costing you time and money.
Metadata facilitates repeatability, ease of maintenance, and programmatic updates.
It is important that your metadata be common to and shared by your decision support applications and your operational data. Notice that the metadata representation in Figure 1 has an arrowhead on both ends. If your metadata is common and shared, it can reflect decisions made from the analysis of your warehouse data. Because metadata is so important to the warehousing process, SAS is continuing to improve the metadata sharing and management tools that are provided with our warehousing solution. The ETL process consists of all of the steps necessary to extract data from its current location, transform the data from operational data to business data using your business rules, and load that data into your warehouse.