What is a Staging Area and What is the purpose of Staging Area

 Below are the few points that i would like to list out about Staging area

• Staging area is a place where you hold temporary tables on data warehouse server. Staging tables are connected to work area or fact tables. We basically need staging area to hold the data, and perform data cleansing and merging, before loading the data into warehouse.

• In the absence of a staging area, the data load will have to go from the OLTP system to the OLAP system directly, which in fact will severely hamper the performance of the OLTP system. This is the primary reason for the existence of a staging area. In addition, it also offers a platform for carrying out data cleansing.

• Staging area is a temp schema used to
1. Do flat mapping i.e. dumping all the OLTP data in to it without applying any business rules. Pushing data into staging will take less time because there are no business rules or transformation applied on it.
2. Used for data cleansing and validation using First Logic

• A staging area is like a large table with data separated from their sources to be loaded into a data warehouse in the required format. If we attempt to load data directly from OLTP, it might mess up the OLTP because of format changes between a warehouse and OLTP. Keeping the OLTP data intact is very important for both the OLTP and the warehouse.

• According to the complexity of the business rule, we may require staging area, the basic need of staging area is to clean the OLTP source data and gather in a place. Basically it’s a temporary database area. Staging area data is used for the further process and after that they can be deleted.

Please share your view about staging area......