Mumbai University > Information Technology > Sem 5 > Advanced Database Management System

Marks: 10M

Year: Dec 2015

• Metadata is simply defined as data about data.
• The data that is used to represent other data is known as metadata.
• For e.g. the index of a book servers as a metadata for contents in the book.
• In other words, we can say that metadata is the summarized data that leads us to detailed data. In terms of data warehouse, we can define metadata as following:-
• Metadata is the road-map to a data warehouse.
• Metadata in a data warehouse defines the warehouse objects.
• Metadata acts a directory. This directory helps the decision support system to locate the contents of a data warehouse.
• In data ware, we create metadata for the data names & definition of a given data warehouse.
• Along with this metadata, additional metadata is also created for time-stamping any extracted data, the source of extracted data.
• Metadata is used in reporting tools plays important role in loading function.
• Is used for query tools.
• It also helps in summarization between lightly detailed data & highly summarized data.
• Helps in decision support system for mapping of data when data is transformed from operational environment to data warehouse environment.