Web Technologies and Data Warehousing Synergies

Abstract

Data warehousing is an emerging technology that greatly extends the capabilities of relational databases specifically in the analysis of very large sets of time-oriented data. The emergence of data warehousing has been somewhat eclipsed over the past decade by the simultaneous emergence of Web technologies. However, Web technologies and data warehousing have some natural synergies that are not immediately obvious. First, Web technologies make data warehouse data more easily available to a much wider variety of users. Second, data warehouse technologies can be used to analyze traffic to a Web site in order to gain a much better understanding of the visitors to the Web site. It is this second synergy that is the focus of this article.