Control flows and activities

Warehousing applications consist of control flows and activities. Control flows are runtime data warehousing processes.

An activity is the runtime equivalent of a data flow or some other unit of work that is defined in a control flow and runs independently, such as a shell script. Each operator in a control flow (data flow, command, email, and so on) runs as an activity within a control flow process.

For example, you can design a set of related data flows that load the tables in a star schema. Then you can create control flows that contain the data flows and deploy one or more applications that contain those control flows. Regardless of the deployment choice you make, an activity is a unit of work that contains data flows, and a control flow is a process with activities inside it.