What are the security issues in a data warehouse?


Data Warehousing is an approach that is generally used to collect and handle data from multiple sources to give the business significant business insight. A data warehouse is specifically designed to support management decisions.

In simple terms, a data warehouse defines a database that is maintained independently from an organization’s operational databases. Data warehouse systems enable the integration of multiple application systems. They provide data processing by offering a solid platform of consolidated, historical information for analysis.

Data warehouses generalize and centralize data in multidimensional space. The construction of data warehouses contains data cleaning, data integration, and data transformation and can be looked at as an important preprocessing step for data mining.

It provides online analytical processing (OLAP) tools for the interactive analysis of multidimensional data of varied granularities, which facilitates effective data generalization and data mining. There are several data mining functions, including association, classification, prediction, and clustering can be integrated with OLAP operations to build up interactive mining of knowledge at various levels of abstraction.

Data Warehouse Systems serve users or knowledge workers for data analysis and decision-making. Such systems can construct and present data in a specific structure to accommodate the diverse requirement of several users. These systems are known as Online-Analytical Processing (OLAP) Systems.

OLAP is a wide term that also surrounds data warehousing. In this model, data is saved in a format, which allows the effective creation of data mining/documents. OLAP design should accommodate reporting on large recordsets with a small degradation in operational effectiveness.

The complete term that can define taking data structures in an OLTP structure and influencing the same data in an OLAP structure is “Dimensional Modeling” It is the basic building block of Data Warehousing.

A data warehouse can employ a multilevel security model to classify and restrict data according to various security levels with users permitted access to only their authorized level. There are various types of security at different levels −

  • Application development − Extra security code can be needed for each of the process managers.

  • Load manager − It can require the checking of code to filter records and place them in different locations depending on their contents. Extra transformation rules can also be needed to modify sensitive fields to hide certain data.

  • Warehouse manager − It can be needed to create a code and maintain all the extra views and aggregations required to enforce the security.

  • Query manager − It requires the changes to handle any access restriction. Extra views, aggregations, and tables that may be required to enforce the security will also need to be developed.

Updated on: 15-Feb-2022

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