内容简介
The last few years have seen a growing recognition of information as a key business tool. Those who successfully gather, analyze, understand, and act upon information are among the winners in this new information age. There- fore, it is only reasonable to expect the rate of producing and consuming infor- mation to grow. We can define information as that which resolves uncertainty. We can further say that decisionmaking is the progressive resolution of uncer- tainty and is a key to a purposeful behavior by any mechanism (or organism). In general, the current business market dynamics make it abundantly clear that, for any company, information is the very key to survival. If we look at the evolution of the information processing technologies, we can see that while the first generation of client/server systems brought data to the desktop, not all of this data was easy to understand, unfortunately, and as such, it was not very useful to end users. As a result, a number of new tech- nologies have emerged that are focused on improving the information content of the data to empower the knowledge workers of today and tomorrow. Among these technologies are data warehousing, metadata repositories, online analyt- ical processing (OLAP), and data mining. In some ways, these technologies are the manifestation of the maturity of the client/server computing model and its applicability to a wide variety of business problems. Therefore, this book is about the need, the value, and the technological means of acquiring and using information in the information age.
目录
Foreword xix Preface xxi Part 1. Foundation Chapter 1. Introduction to Data Warehousing 1.1 Why All the Excitement 1.2 The Need for Data Warehousing 1.3 Paradigm Shift 1.3.1 Computing Paradigm 1.3.2 Business Paradigm 1.4 Business Problem Definition 1.5 Operational and Informational Data Stores* 1.6 Data Warehouse Definition and Characteristics 1.7 Data Warehouse Architecture 1.8 Chapter Summary Chapter 2. Client/Server Computing Model and Data Warehousing 2.1 Overview of Client/Server Architecture 2.1.1 Host-based Processing 2.1.2 Master-Slave Processing 2.1.3 First-Generation Client/Server Processing 2.1.4 Second-Generation Client/Server Processing 2.2 Server Specialization in Client/Server Computing Environments 2.3 Server Functions 2.4 Server Hardware Architecture 2.5 System Considerations 2.6 RISC versus ClSC 2.7 Multiprocessor Systems 2.7.1 SMP Design 2.7.2 SMP Features 2.7.3 SMP Operating Systems 2.8 SMP Implementations Chapter 3. Parallel Processors and Cluster Systems 3.1 Distributed-Memory Architecture 3.1.1 Shared-Nothing Architectures 3.1.2 Shared-Disk Systems 3.2 Research Issues 3.3 Cluster Systems 3.4 Advances in Multiprocessing Architectures 3.5 Optimal Hardware Architecture for Query Scalability* 3.5.1 Uniformity of Data Access Times 3.5.2 System Architecture Taxonomy and Query Execution 3.6 Server Operating Systems 3.6.1 Operating System Requirements 3.6.2 Microkernel Technology 3.7 Operating System Implementations 3.7.1 UNIX 3.7.2 Windows/NT 3.7.3 OS/2 3.7.4 NetWare 3.7.5 OS Summary Chapter 4. Distributed DBMS Implementations 4.1 Implementation Trends and Features of Distributed Client/Server DBMS 4.1.1 RDBMS Architecture for Scalability 4.1.2 RDBMS Performance and Efficiency Features 4.1.3 Types of Parallelism 4.2 DBMS Connectivity 4.3 Advanced RDBMS Features 4.4 RDBMS Reliability and Availability 4.4.1 Robustness, Transactions Recovery, and Consistency 4.4.2 Fault Tolerance 4.5 RDBMS Administration Chapter 5. Client/Server RDBMS Solutions 5.1 State-of-the-Market Overview 5.2 Oracle 5.2.1 System Management 5.2.2 Oracle Universal Server 5.2.3 Oracle ConText Option 5.2.4 Oracle Spatial Data Option 5.3 Informix 5.3.1 Features 5.3.2 Informix Universal Server 5.4 Sybase 5.4.1 SYbase SQL Server 5.4.2 Performance Improvements in SYbase System 11 5.5 IBM 5.5.1 Background 5.5.2 DB2 Universal Database 5.6 Microsoft 5.6.1 Background 5.6.2 MS SQL Server 5.6.3 Data Warehousing and Market Positioning Part 2 Data Warehousing Chapter 6. Data Warehousing Components 6.1 Overall Architecture 6.2 Data Warehouse Database 6.3 Sourcing, Acquisition, Cleanup, and Transformation Tools 6.4 metadata 6.5 Access Tools 6.5.1 Query and Reporting Tools 6.5.2 Applications 6.5.3 OLAP 6.5.4 Data Mining 6.5.5 Data Visualization 6.6 Data Marts 6.7 Data Warehouse Administration and Management 6.8 Information Delivery System
