A huge volume of data is generated in an organization daily, through various sources. Organizations heavily rely upon the data to make business decisions, analyze performance, and make strategies to attract customers. The data pouring in, however, needs to be integrated into a shared platform so that different departments can access the data and use it for BI purposes.
What is a Data Warehouse?
To fulfill this requirement, organizations are now widely using data warehouses. A data warehouse is a centralized repository where organizations store their data. Data warehouses make the analysis simpler by consolidating and storing the data in a single location. It improves the speed of accessing the data sets and allows business analysts to derive faster insights. Therefore, data warehouses are at the core of an efficient BI and analytics architecture.
Benefits of a Data Warehouse
The benefits of a data warehouse are enormous for any organization as more and more organizations are making it a part of their data management pipelines. Here are some of the major benefits of a data warehouse:
- Historical data
Comparing old data with your current data is crucial to analyzing current performance and predicting future patterns. Modern Data warehouses are equipped with the ability to store historical data records. In order to enable the user to compare historical data and see crucial patterns and trends. This feature is also called “slowly changing dimensions”. This functionality isn’t offered by legacy databases.
- Data Quality
Businesses generate data in multiple formats including structured and unstructured formats. Modern data warehouses come with ETL functionality that allows businesses to integrate data from disparate sources and store data in consistent formats that can be used for analytics. Data warehouses also ensure similar data quality and standards for data coming in from different business departments.
- Boosts Efficiency
Since all the data is made available in a single location, it’s readily available to anyone to access rather than accessing data from multiple sources. This eliminates the need to go to a data assistant, get data sorted and formatted into the correct format before running analysis. Hence, improving overall efficiency.
- Faster Time to Analytics
With standardized and quality data consolidated and stored into a single source of truth, data warehouses make it easier to access the data and feed it into a BI platform faster. This speed provides business departments with a competitive advantage by enabling faster time to insights.
- Scalability
A data warehouse must be robust and able to handle bulk amounts of data. Today’s data warehouses are built to grow along with the business and handle the increasing load of data and queries. This arrangement allows for easier data valuation processes, which leads to a deeper understanding of your digital assets and their capabilities in growing your business.
- Data warehouse Automation
Data warehouse automation is one of the most important elements of modern data warehouses. Data warehouse automation software allows IT teams to deliver much more at a faster pace. It reduces the process complexity and time consumption as a majority of the repetitive tasks such as design, development, and deployment involved in the data warehousing process are automated. It allows the team to focus on strategic elements of the business while the data warehouse meets the evolving needs of the business.
Conclusion:
Modern data warehouse tools are becoming widely used due to their high usability. Users can extract data from disparate sources, build data models, and deploy on desired locations without writing any code. DWA simplifies time-consuming processes and allows business users to take charge.