Overview of Importing Data to the Data Warehouse
The data that populates the Data Warehouse typically comes from multiple data sources: Web server logs, Commerce Server databases, and other data sources that you specify. The following figure shows the sources for operational data, and how the data might be used to support tasks run from Business Desk.
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Because the Data Warehouse is not part of your run-time environment, a system administrator must determine how frequently to import the operational data into the Data Warehouse. For example, you can set up the Data Warehouse so that it automatically imports new data every day or every week. The frequency with which you will need to import data depends on the amount of new data collected every day in your operational data sources. Commerce Server includes custom Data Transformation Service (DTS) tasks that simplify the importing of data to the Data Warehouse. These DTS tasks import data that is used with the reports available from Business Desk.
Even though the operational data can be imported from different types of databases—or from storage media that are not databases—all of the data is structured in a consistent manner after it is gathered into the Data Warehouse. For example, you might have one data source in which the first and last names of a user are stored in the same field, and another in which the first and last names are stored in separate fields. When this data is imported to the Data Warehouse, it is automatically structured to be consistent, thus enabling your analysis activities.
See Also
Using the Data Warehouse in Web Site Management
Preparing Data for Analysis with OLAP
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