Thursday, October 23, 2008

Consumer

Consumer refers to an individual, group, or application that accesses data or information in a data warehouse.

A data warehouse is a very complex database system where every single day, data is gathered, transformed, loaded and shared across multiple platforms. These data come from different sources, whether from different geographic locations with disparate physical database server infrastructure, or from different divisions within the same physical location of the business organization.

Data in the warehouse are accessed by many data consumers. In the internet, people from all walks of life are all data consumers. Young people and teenagers are primary data consumers of multimedia like compressed video files and music files. They also consume large digital photo data files. University professor may consume data related to research on their subject of expertise. Students are consumers of data pertaining to their records within their university.

Software applications are also big consumers of data. Business intelligence is a software application that gets all sorts of disparate from the warehouse. From these data, processes are execute within the business intelligence system so that data can be aggregated and formatted into statistical reports for the company to spot industry trends and patterns. Data consumers can benefit from business intelligence by making use of the intelligence report to decision making.

In the past, the day business organizations gathered data was through non-automated sources. In those times, businesses were lacking in computing resources to get the proper data analysis. Because of this, the decisions of businesses were mostly based on intuition.

But as advancement in information technology dawned, more and more complex data systems capable for of very fast processing and accurate reporting were developed and made available to many companies. But still problems existed in data collection because of the lack of infrastructure for data exchange as well as incompatibilities between systems and data consumers still have frustrations with bad data quality.
With the development of model relational database management system, data warehouses have become more and more efficient not just in gathering, extracting, transforming and loading data into the warehouse but in sharing the appropriate data to the consumers as well. Newer tools like Enterprise Application Integration have greatly increased speed of collecting and distributing data to consumers. Another tool, Online Analytical Processing or OLAP, has also helped in generating new reports which analyze data a lot faster and more efficient. Data warehouses now work closely with business intelligence systems in implementing the art and science of shifting through very large bulks of data, extracting the pertinent information from them and turning the information into knowledge for consumers to take benefit of.
Today's data warehouses service data consumers by executing queries. A query language is a form of communication between an end user and a database so that the computer system can understand. A single query may return thousands of data from the database and present the data to the requesting consumer in a report format for easy interpretation and analysis.
Sharing of data across the network should be given serious precaution. Not all data consumers are good people. In fact, there millions of malicious data consumers all over the internet and they will do all they can to illegally gain access to the database and get or steal private information including bank account details and credit card number. Every year, millions of dollars are lost from people's account because of these malicious data consumers. One way to prevent private data from being stolen is by using a secure connection with the user of encryption tools to conceal confidential data like passwords and credit card numbers.

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