Abstract: Data warehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) are essential elements of decision support, which has increasingly become a focus of the database industry. Many commercial products and services are now available, and all of the principal database management system vendors now have offerings in these areas. Decision support places some rather different requirements on database technology compared to traditional on-line transaction processing applications. This paper provides an overview of Data warehousing, Data Mining, OLAP, OLTP technologies, exploring the features, applications and the architecture of Data Warehousing. The data warehouse supports On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), the functional and performance requirements of which are quite different from those of the On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications traditionally supported by the operational databases. Data warehousing and OLAP have emerged as leading technologies that facilitate data storage, organization and then, significant retrieval. Decision support places some rather different requirements on database technology compared to traditional on-line transaction processing applications.

Keywords: Data Warehousing, OLAP, OLTP, Data Mining, Decision Making and Decision Support.