(from Information Systems Management, vol. 17, issue 2, 2000)
Web-based
data warehousing systems have the advantages of ease of access, platform independence,
and lower establishment cost but there are also challenges in implementing
these systems. These challenges and proposed solutions include:
1. Scalability - Too many "hits" on a website can create slower transmission,
lower performance, and increased server problems on the network. This can
highly lower user satisfaction but can be improved by increasing server capability,
ensuring server reliability, improving network bandwidth, and utilizin multiple
mainframes with massive parallel processors (MPP).
2. Speed - The issue of speed can be dealt with high
speed communcation lines, ISDN, cable modems, t1 and t3 lines, satelite networks
and XDSL options. Also a caching technique is useful for data that is accessed
from disks. For example, if someone requests data from a disk, the system
checks disk cache first and if the data has been previously accessed, the
system won't reaccess the data.
3. Security - There are two categories of security that need to be dealt with:
unauthorized attempts to access private data via internal and external communication
networks and computer viruses. The problems can be dealt with by applying
user level security, not making extremely sensitive data available through
the internet, and by using methods such as enscryption, secure protocol, and
public/private key protocol;
Basically, in my search for the best data management system, I will take
into considerations scalability, speed, and security, as well as look for
some of the methods suggested in the systems I will analyze and assess
.