With the huge advancement in technologies directed towards the rapid improvement and optimization of business processes, an enormous quantity of tools and applications emerged to meet the vast requirements and needs of the knowledge workers of this new era. These tremendous systems varieties used different types of repositories and format to store, access and edit data. This variety of systems used throughout the organization made data integration for managerial purposes very difficult since many obstacles came forth (data formats, incompatible repositories, data structure design etc...). A need for a reliable, integrated and centralized data source system was vital to support the managerial and business decision support process. The chronological improvements of the data warehouse since its inception in the eighties took into consideration those organizations' growing needs.

The Benefits of DWA

• It is subject-oriented; the data warehouse deals with data on the business process level
• Enables changes traceability made to the original data
• Non-volatile data, once recorded it can not be deleted or over-written
• Integration of operational source data into a single reliable repository
• Ensures the easy accessibility of information
• Adaptive and flexible to change
• Publishes the organization's information in a consistent manner
• Enables secure data
• It is the base for an improved and reliable decision making
• Represents an advanced decision support system (DSS)