In today’s competitive business world, every organization generates enormous volumes of data on a daily basis, and every critical decision is based on those data sources. Manual combining data from multiple sources and performing its proper analysis is a daunting and time-consuming process. This is when data warehousing comes into the picture. With an advanced data warehousing solution, you can turn massive amounts of data integrated from multiple source systems into a lucid format. The solution is not less than a boon for industries struggling to break their big data silos and get valuable insights into their business operations.
What is Data Warehousing?
Data Warehousing is a process that involves aggregation and management of high volumes of data, residing in different source systems of an organization. The collected data is analyzed precisely to derive meaningful business insights. A data warehouse is used to store the business data and act as a core for the BI system, which is further used for analysis and reporting.
The solution is backed with state-of-the-art technologies that assist analysts and data scientists in using data strategically. In simple words, it is a process of transforming complex data into information that different departments across an organization can use for business growth.
How does it work?
Data flows into the data warehouse from multiple marketing and social platforms. Where the same is transformed into a useful and easy to understand format. The data brought to the warehouse can be any form, like structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. Business intelligence tools can be used to access the data once it is processed, transformed, and ingested in the data warehouse.
The warehouse merges information coming from different sources into one big database. Once all the information is merged under one big umbrella, an organization can analyze its business operations and target market more holistically. This way, you will not miss out on any piece of crucial business information. The process will also help you look for patterns in the data that can help you boost your sale and bring more revenue to your business.
Types of Data Warehouse?
There are three types of data warehouses, and that is as follows:
- Enterprise Data Warehouse: It is a centralized warehouse that supports decision making processes across an organization. The warehouse follows a unified approach for integrating, organizing, and representing the data. It allows you to give different users limited access to the data stored in the warehouse.
- Operational Data Store: It is used when data warehouse and OLTP systems fail to meet organizational reporting needs. With this at your end, you can have access to crucial business information in real-time.
- Data Mart: Being a subset of a data warehouse, data mart works best for a particular line of a business like accounting, sales, etc. It carries the data integration process accurately and delivers you insights that can help you boost your business operations.
Data Warehouse Tools
There are multiple tools available in the market that you can use for data warehousing, and some of them are as follows:
- Oracle: Oracle is one of the best tools you can use with both on-cloud and on-premise data warehouse solutions. With this tool at your end, you can optimize customer experiences by enhancing your business operational efficiency.
- MarkLogic: The tool offers a wide range of enterprise solutions that makes the data integration process faster and easier. With this tool, you can perform complex search operations like a pro. The tool can query diverse types of data, such as relationships, documents, and metadata.
- Amazon RedShift: It is a simple and cost-effective data warehouse tool that helps you analyze all types of data using existing BI tools and standard SQL. The tool allows us to use the technique of query optimization that allows you to run queries against petabytes of structured data.
Summing up
With data warehousing solutions, you can access the critical business data at your fingertips. It provides you with a consistent flow of information that allows you to make time-sensitive decisions more effectively. It supports ad-hoc reporting, which means that you don’t have to be a technical person to perform the data analysis process. In a data warehouse, along with accessing your current data, you can also access historical data to get a clear picture of where your business is heading.