Insurance is an important and growing sector for the data warehousing market.
Several factors have come together in the last year or two to make data warehouses for large insurance companies both possible and extremely necessary. Insurance companies generate several complicated transactions that must be analyzed in many different ways. With the advent of powerful SMP and MPP Unix processors and powerful database query software, these big complicated databases have begun to enter the comfort zone for data warehousing. At the same time, the insurance industry is under incredible pressure to reduce costs. The design of a big insurance data warehouse must deal with several issues common to all insurance companies.