Research And Application Of Data Warehouse Technology In Electric Power Industry Decision Making

Power industry is entering the stage of rapid development. The industry's service concept is changing from planning power distribution to exploring market, from administration to marketing and serving. This new mechanism follows the direction of the market, centers internally on sales and management while externally on client service. It requires the administrators and decision makers of an enterprise to make quick and scientific decision according to changing environment. However, the OLTP-based power management information systems of most domestic power-supplying enterprises do not suit well in analyzing and making decision. Traditional system is business oriented, lacking support to administrators and decision makers. DW technology is very important to domestic enterprises in every trade. With the shifting of management strategy from production centralized to client centered, the potential value of information is attracted more and more. It is necessary to establish various multi-dimensional models for online analysis on the basis of the strong support of data to meet the requirements of clients of different levels for analyzing and making decision, and form a complete information analyzing system of the enterprises management.There are mainly two types of information processing, i.e. task oriented processing and information oriented processing. Conventional database has achieved great success in online task processing (OLTP), but it can not meet the administrator's requirement for decision making and analyzing. Because the administrator wishes to analyze the organization's great amount of data and understand its business development trend, while the conventional database keeps only current administration information, lacking the great amount of historical information needed for decision making and analyzing. To meet suchrequirement of the administrator, a new data environment, data warehouse-DW, has been established on the basis of database.This paper describes the principle of DW technology and its realization. It briefly introduces the concept of DW, and the process of model-development, planning, and analyzing. It also discusses the concept and features of online analyzing and processing (OLAP), multi-dimensional data structure and multi-dimensional data analysis.It also discusses the application of DW technology in power industry decision-making and supporting system. With the example of comprehensive analysis and assistant decision-making for power distribution based on multi-dimensional OLAP technology, it presents the designing idea, structure, characteristics and function of the system, and putting forward the core of power distribution comprehensive analysis: power distribution, business extension, measurement devices and power-consumption checking and examining.Finally, this paper makes preliminary discussion about the procedure carrying out the projects applying DW technology, its steps and risks.