Your industrial supply company wants to create a data warehouse where management can obtain a single corporate-wide view of critical sales information to identify bestselling products, key customers, and sales trends. Your sales and product information are stored in several different systems: a divisional sales system running on a Unix server and a corporate sales system running on an IBM mainframe. You would like to create a single standard format that consolidates these data from both systems. In MyMISLab, you can review the proposed format, along with sample files from the two systems that would supply the data for the data warehouse. Then answer the following questions:
• What business problems are created by not having these data in a single standard format?
• How easy would it be to create a database with a single standard format that could store the data from both systems? Identify the problems that would have to be addressed.
• Should the problems be solved by database specialists or general business managers? Explain.
• Who should have the authority to finalize a single company-wide format for this information in the data warehouse?