DataWare Housing Glossary of Terms - 'A'

Agent	An application that searches data and sends an alert when a certain situation occurs. (See ALERT)
Aggregate data	Individual data items, data groups, arrays, tables etc. that can be assembled to form a whole.
Alerts and Alarms	Messages sent automatically by a computer system when an AGENT identifies a certain situation. For example, if stock of an item in a warehouse drops to a certain level, key personnel can be immediately informed.
Algorithm	A set of statements organized to solve a problem in a finite number of steps
Analytical Processing	The usage of the computer to produce an analysis for management decision, usually involving trend analysis, drill down analysis, demographic analysis, profiling, etc.
Architecture Phase	The establishment of the framework, scope and standards and procedures for a data warehouse at the enterprise level.
Atomic level data	Data with the lowest level of granularity. Atomic level data sits in a data warehouse and is time variant (i.e., accurate as of some moment in time now passed).
Attribute	A property or characteristic of an application entity. For example, the attributes of an EMPLOYEE entity in a business application may be: IDFirstname Lastname Job_Title Email_ID An attribute usually represents a column in a table in a relational database, or a field in a file.
Audit Trail	Recording of any changes made to specific data. Details can include date and time of change, how the change was detected, reason for the change and before-and-after data values.