In today's competitive world, organizations that leverage customer data improve business execution because they quickly adjust strategies to enhance performance and outpace the competition. The collecting of data, probably via a batch job on a monthly basis, represents a traditional data warehouse used for decision support. Decisions are most likely not made as a result of a single event.

Accommodating a customer within minutes of an event represents an active data warehouse (ADW). Database triggers are a key component of an active data warehouse. A trigger is a device used to release or activate a mechanism. A database trigger is a set of synchronous Structured Query Language (SQL) statements that execute automatically when a specific operation, such as changing data in a table, occurs.