DataWare Housing Glossary of Terms - 'C'

Canonical model	A data model that represents the inherent structure of data without regard to either individual use or hardware or software implementation.
Cardinality	no of unique rows divided by total no of columns
Cell	A single point in a CUBE.
Conceptual Schema	A consistent collection of data structures expressing the data needs of the organization. This schema is a comprehensive, base level, and logical description of the environment in which an organization exists, free of physical structure and application system considerations.
Condensation	The process of reducing the volume of data managed without reducing the logical consistency of the data.
Connector	A symbol used to indicate that one occurrence of data has a relationship with another occurrence of data. Connectors are used in conceptual data base design and can be implemented hierarchically, relationally, in an inverted fashion, or by a network.
Contention	Tthe condition that occurs when two or more programs try to access the same data at the same time.
Cooperative Processing	Tthe ability to distribute resources (programs, files and data bases) across the network.
Corporate Data	All the databases of the company.This includes legacy systems,old and new transaction systems,general business systems,client/server databases,data warehouses and data marts.
Corporate Information Warehouse (CIF)	The architectural framework that houses the ODS, data warehouse, data marts, i/t interface, and the operational environment. The cif is held together logically by metadata and physically by a network such as the Internet.
Cube – (also Hypercube, Multi-dimensional Cube)	The fundamental structure for information in an OLAP system. A structure that stores multi-dimensional information, having one CELL for each possible combination of dimensions.