Federated Data Warehouse

What is a Federated Data Warehouse?

Most techniques used by organizations to build a data warehousing system employ either a top-down or bottom-up development approach. In the top-down approach, an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is built in an iterative manner and underlying dependent data marts are created as required. In the bottom-up approach, independent data marts are created with the view to integrating them into an enterprise data warehouse at some time in the future. There are many pros and cons of the two approaches but there is a steady trend toward the use of independent data marts, especially with the move toward the use of turnkey analytic application packages.

A solution must offer low cost and rapid ROI advantages of the independent data mart approach without problems of data integration in the future. Such a solution is called the federated data warehouse. Two components of a federated data warehouse are the common business model and shared information staging areas