Operational Data versus Decision Support Data

Owned by Computer Science Department
Aug 03, 2023
1 min read

  • Although BI is used at the strategic and tactical managerial levels within organizations, its effectiveness depends on the quality of data gathered at the operational level

    • Operational data is seldom well suited to decision support tasks

  • Operational data is useful for capturing daily business transactions

  • Decision support data gives tactical and strategic business meaning to the operational data

  • Decision support data differs from operational data in three main areas

    • Time span

    • Granularity (level of aggregation)

    • Dimensionality

  • The decision support database schema must support complex, non-normalized data representations

    • It must contain data that is aggregated and summarized and the queries must be able to extract multidimensional time slices

  • Data extraction capabilities should allow batch and scheduled data extraction and should support different data sources and check for inconsistent data or data validation rules

  • Database size – the DBMS must be capable of supporting very large databases (VLDBs)

    • To support a VLDB, the DBMS might be required to support advanced storage technologies and multiple-processor technologies