Data Warehouses

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Data warehousing was a powerful field of study in the 1990s as the business requirements changed from transaction processing to analyzing the data. This post seeks to discuss the concepts behind Data warehousing along with the purpose of Data warehousing.

From the days of data bases to Big Data analytics – we have come a long way. The very concept of storing data and querying it was refreshingly new in the 90’s. Times changed and Data warehousing necessities and concepts pierced the IT landscape.

What is a Data warehouse?

“Data” that is stored on different systems like CRM, ERP, flat files and operational systems for a particular organization are in different formats and not much can be understood from this data.  In order to get a grasp of this data and understand the meaning it conveys, the data is extracted from the different sources, cleaned and loaded (ETL) onto the data warehouse. Once the data is loaded onto the DW, it can be used for generating different reports for making informed business decisions.

DataWarehouse

This represents a broad overview of Data warehousing. Wikipedia further defines DW as “central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data and are used for creating analytical reports for knowledge workers throughout the enterprise” (Data Warehouse)

Reasons for creating Data warehouses:

Having seen a brief overview of Data warehouses, let us see the reason behind creating Data warehouses.

  1. Improves Data quality :
    Database redesign, Database consolidation, manual entry to enter database values all cause poor data quality. When a data warehouse is created, data quality improves as the data from different sources is merged and standardized. Errors are also rectified during the transformation.
  1. Provides historical data :
    Data warehouses can be used to store huge amounts of data and hence can store data from an earlier point of time. This can be compared and contrasted to the current period of time. This comparing and contrasting will especially be useful if we would like to target goals relating to sales and marketing.
  1. Improves integration :
    Data warehouses improve integration as the data from different sources is merged and a clear picture emerges from all the data.
  1. Better reporting :
    DW solutions enable better reporting as it is much more easy and flexible to generate reports all the by the click of a mouse.
  1. Generates better ROI :
    Organizations that implement DW solutions experience a better ‘Return on investment’ which is a huge motivating factor. (NINE REASONS TO BUILD A DATA WAREHOUSE) (Top Five Benefits of a Data Warehouse)

The above are some of the reasons for creating a Data warehouse.

Data warehousing in the age of Data Analytics:

In this age of Data Analytics, Big Data and Hadoop it is interesting to think about the future of Data warehouses. Are they necessary? Will they be replaced?

Data warehouses are implemented as single relational databases while Hadoop’s implementation span multiple machines and deal with massive amounts of data. Some organizations do try and move certain workloads of a DW (like ETL) to Hadoop but so far data warehouse migrations to Hadoop are not frequent. The future might see certain concepts move from DW to Hadoop but DWs may not be replaced entirely.

Bibliography
Data Warehouse. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse
NINE REASONS TO BUILD A DATA WAREHOUSE. (n.d.). Retrieved from PASSIONNED GROUP: https://www.passionned.com/nine-reasons-to-build-a-data-warehouse/
Top Five Benefits of a Data Warehouse. (n.d.). Retrieved from TIBCO Spotfire: http://spotfire.tibco.com/blog/?p=7597

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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