What is the difference between ODS and Dataware house?

[Deepa]

Hi,

What is the difference between an ODS system and data-ware house technology? Are not they both serving us the same? Then why to have both them? Can someone please explain it to me?

[Anuj Dhawan]

An operational data store, commonly known as "ODS" is a database designed to integrate data from multiple sources for additional operations on the data, for reporting, controls and operational decision support. This is "collection of loosely connected data-sources from the enterprise" to give end user an access to the data they don't have any control but needs to drive a conclusion based on that. It's not like a production master data store as in the data is not passed back to operational systems. It may be passed for further operations and to the data warehouse for reporting.

Because the data originate from multiple sources, the integration often involves cleaning, resolving redundancy and checking against business rules for integrity. An ODS is usually designed to contain low-level or atomic (indivisible) data (such as transactions and prices) with limited history that is captured "real time" or "near real time" as opposed to the much greater volumes of data stored in the data warehouse generally on a less-frequent basis. An ODS is not a replacement of DWH and should never be looked at as a substitute for a data warehouse.

DWH, Data warehouse, on the other hand is a "place" to store current and historical data in one single location and are used for creating analytical reports for knowledge workers throughout the enterprise.

In 2017, rather interesting question is - with the advent of Big Data and Cloud how relevant the EWH is, thoughts!?

[nicc]

Do you mean Operational Data Store or Output Delivery System. As did not specify I assume that you did not research first otherwise you would have known to specify what you are referring to. You should do your research first.

[Robert Sample]

What is the difference between an ODS system and data-ware house technology?

When you use an acronym such as ODS, you need to use the full name the first time before referencing just the acronym. This is because there are a lot of identical acronyms in the world and IT in particular -- www.acronymfinder.com returns 61 meanings for ODS, for example. To a SAS programmer, ODS is Output Delivery System.

[Deepa]

I thought ODS was a common term like mainframes. I was asking about Operational Data Store. According to me no other synonym of it can be compared with DWH technology.

[Robert Sample]

ODS is a common term for SAS programmers to refer to the Output Delivery System.

You did it again, by the way -- you may ASSUME (and we know what that does) that "DWH" means data warehouse, but www.acronymfinder returns ELEVEN meanings for DWH. When you want to use an acronym, explain it FIRST.

[Robert Sample]

Oh, and by the way, data warehouses are NOT specific to mainframes -- if you Google data warehouse, one of the 61,400,000 results returned on the first page (at least for me) refers to Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse -- which certainly is not running on any mainframe! My company, for example, has a mainframe that is used for financials, customer ordering, inventory control -- but our data warehouse is kept on the network on Linux machines. The mainframe feeds the data warehouse but that's the only interaction between the mainframe and the data warehouse.

[Deepa]

Sorry all if I started asking so confusing question. I wanted to ask the difference between operational data store and Data ware-house.