Historically, the bulk of investment in corporate computing has been in systems that generate or capture data, such as accounting, order processing, manufacturing, and customer information. Increasingly, organizations are investing in applications and technologies that deliver additional value from this collected data. Data warehousing is the process of collecting, cleansing, and sifting data from a variety of operational systems and making the resultant information available to a wide audience of end users for analysis and reporting. Data warehouse and data mart are terms used to describe these nonvolatile stores of cleansed and summarized information that are available for browsing by users.