Contents 3. Past, Present and Future 4. Data Warehouses and Business Organisations 5. Conclusion 6. Bibliography 1.0 Introduction In recent years, data warehousing has emerged as the primary method of analysing sales and marketing data for a competitive advantage. As the number of knowledge workers using the data warehouse/data mart grows and the amount of data increases daily, performance problems have become a major concern of both the Information Systems staff and the users. Many options have been tried in an attempt to solve the performance problems - from bigger hardware to different software or database tuning and redesi