National Information Centre

The SSI National Information Centre (NIC ®) follows a different approach by connecting directly to the original data sources, external or internal, while staying as close as possible to the original data source’s structure due to mapping sets of data from the format of the respective original data source into the NIC node by running little or no processing at all. The data that is present in the original data sources is being referenced in order to provide query and alter functionality while avoiding copying data from the original data source.

This approach enables the addition of new data sources to be as simple as it would be with the legacy approaches that can even be combined. As the amount of reference data is smaller than what would be needed if considering the relationships and redundancies inherent from a traditional data warehousing system treating data copied from another system; and as references can be introduced as required, total storage space follows the normalized structure needs in a slower pace, while a data warehouse usually requires that all facts, copies from tables from the original system, have values for all measurements and related dimensions, greatly increasing required database storage and processing power for each newly added dimension, to a point that some solutions can simply break; leading to a situation called the database explosion phenomenon.