Operational data store

An operational data store is used for operational reporting and as a source of data for the enterprise data warehouse. An operational data store should not be confused with an enterprise data hub. An operational data will take transactional data from one or more production system. An ODS is not an intrinsic part of an Enterprise Data Hub solution, although an EDH may be used to subsume some of the processing performed by an ODS and the Enterprise Data Warehouse. An EDH is a broker of data. An ODS is certainly not.

An operational data store (or "ODS") is a database designed to integrate data from multiple sources for additional operations on the data. Unlike a master data store, 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.

General use

The general purpose of an ODS is to integrate data from disparate source systems in a single structure, using data integration technologies like data virtualization, data federation, or extract, transform, and load (ETL). This will allow operational access to the data for operational reporting, master data or reference data management.

An ODS is not a replacement or substitute for a data warehouse but in turn could become a source.

See also

• Some examples of ODS Architecture Patterns can be found in the article Architecture Patterns.
• Enterprise architecture

External links

• ODS Architecture Patterns (EA Reference Architecture)
• Bill Inmon Information Management article on ODS
• Bill Inmon Information Management article on the five classes of ODS
• Claudia Imhoff. "Information Management article on ODS" (PDF).

Further reading

• Inmon, William (1999). Building the Operational Data Store (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-32888-X.