3rd party data - Store in Data Warehouse or Primary database?
- by brydgesk
This is mostly a data warehouse philosophy question.
My project involves an Oracle forms application, and a Teradata Data Warehouse for reporting and ad-hoc purposes. In addition to the primary data created by the users of our application, we also require data from various other sources. Currently, this 3rd party data comes via FTPd flat files directly to our Data Warehouse. To access the data, our users must use a series of custom BusinessObjects reports.
My question is, would it make more sense for this data to be sent to our source Oracle system instead? Is it ever appropriate for a Data Warehouse to be the point of origin for users to access raw data?
In short, is it more important that the operational database contain only the data created by your project, or that the data warehouse remain dedicated solely to reporting and analysis?