Creating a Virtual Data Warehouse for Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

Data warehousing is the best solution to relieve the database management systems from holding the long-standing data which accumulates from day-to-day business transactions. But creating and managing a data warehouse is a complex task, and in addition, data warehouse tools available in the market are very expensive. To make the data warehouse solutions cost-effective, creation of virtual data warehouse is one of the options in the case of applications having limited scope or limited duration. This paper deals with the development of such virtual data warehouse for effective supply chain management for a multinational software development and consultancy company dealing with big semiconductor manufacturing industries. The design and development of the virtual data warehouse is described in detail using the existing database management systems and the existing huge database of the companies. The data warehouse has been created based on the important business requirements, identifying the relevant existing data sources that can be integrated to generate respective dimensional tables and, thereby, the fact tables, and then finally completing the multidimensional models to derive answers to the respective queries. The paper also presents some screen shots of the application interface.