Staging (data)
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In Data warehouse terms, a data staging area is an intermediate storage area between the sources of information and the data warehouse (DW) or Data mart (DM). It is usually of temporary nature, and its contents can be erased after the DW/DM has been loaded successfully.
A staging area can be used for any of the following purposes, among others:
- To gather data from different sources that will be ready to process at different times.
- To quickly load information from the operational database, freeing it up as soon as possible. All the needed transformations can then occur without interfering with the operation.
- To find changes against current DW/DM values.
- For 'data cleansing'
- To pre-calculate aggregates.
- Since the data staging structure does not need to resemble the structure of either the source or the target[1], the mere process of loading the staging area can be a step of the ETL process in itself.
- ^ Is Data Staging Relational?, Ralph Kimball, 1998.
