Learn More About Data Warehouse Solutions
What are Data Warehouse Solutions?
Data warehouse technology is used as a storage mechanism that pulls data from multiple disparate data sources into one single data store in an organized and efficient way to enable analytics and reporting for better decision-making. It is different from traditional database technology which is only capable of recording data. Data warehouse solutions are designed with integration and analysis in mind; and not like other databases that are designed to be queried in a variety of ways. This helps users without knowledge of SQL or other common querying languages to extract information from storage.
A data warehouse acts as a single data repository that is an analytical and reporting database used to store historical data pulled from various disparate data sources. It also enables data retrieval through complex queries using online analytical processing (OLAP).
Most data warehouse technology comes with features for data cleansing and normalization, so data can be stored in a variety of forms. This allows data from sales, marketing, research, and other departments to be stored in their natural forms but cleansed for comparative analysis.
What Types of Data Warehouse Solutions Exist?
Data warehouse solutions enable users to gain critical insights into their data through improved seamless self-service business intelligence (BI) capabilities. Though the purpose of the software remains the same, it differs in the mode of deployment and architecture. A data warehouse solution can be deployed both on the cloud and on-premises.
Cloud data warehouse
With cloud data warehouses, businesses can scale horizontally to hold increased storage and compute requirements. A data warehouse deployed on the cloud provides an improved infrastructure that lets companies focus more on delivering better and faster insights rather than managing a full house of servers on premises. These solutions provide cost control as organizations pay for what they use.
On-premises or license data warehouse
An on-premises data warehouse software lets organizations buy one time, deploy in-house, and enable control over their hardware and software infrastructure. This deployment solution requires a consultant to help with installation and ongoing support. One advantage of on-premises data warehouse solutions is that it gives complete control and access over the data within an organization, helping minimize security risks.
What are the Common Features of Data Warehouse Solutions?
Data warehouses help organizations execute an effective data strategy, they feed structured and standardized data into BI tools which provide data professionals with high-level insights for decision-making. The following are some core features of data warehouse software:
Data source connections: Data warehouses typically rely on a range of data sources. The data can come from disparate sources, such as spreadsheets, banking systems, and software that ranges from SQL servers and relational databases to legacy systems. This feature helps users pull data that they hope to use during the decision-making process.
Data mart: Data warehouses are organized into individual subsections. These segmented storage locations within the data warehouse are typically relevant to an individual team or department. Data warehouse solutions enable users to create data marts within them.
Scaling: Scaling allows the data warehouse to expand storage capacity and functionality while maintaining balanced workloads. This helps facilitate the growing demand for requests and expanding sets of information.
Autoscaling: While many tools allow administrators to control scaling storage, autoscaling features help to reduce the manual aspects. This is done with automation tools or bots that scale services and data automatically or on demand.
Data sharing: Data sharing features offer collaborative functionality for sharing queries and data sets. These can be edited or maintained between users and potentially sent to customers or business partners.
Data discovery: Search tools provide the ability to search vast, global data sets to find relevant information. This allows users self-service access and navigation to multiple datasets.
Data modeling: Data modeling tools help users structure and edit data in a manner that enables quick and accurate insight extraction. They also help translate raw data into a more digestible format.
Compliance: Compliance features monitor assets and enforce security policies. This also helps to audit assets to support compliance with personally identifiable information (PII), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other regulatory standards.
Data staging: Data staging areas are used to normalize and structure information. These transitional storage areas are often used during extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes where information is transformed, consolidated, aligned, and eventually exported.
Presentation tools: Once data has been cleansed and normalized within the staging area, it will be transferred to data marts for access from users. They may be exported at that point or paired with BI tools for further visualization and data analysis.
Integration tools: Integration tools are used both in the collection of information from its various data sources, as well as dispensing information after it has been normalized or modeled. These tools help facilitate the input of information and utilize the data being stored within a data warehouse.
Data transformation: This feature enables functions like data cleansing, data deduplication, data validation, summarization, and more. Data transformation is needed to convert the data into a format that can be used by BI tools to extract actionable insights in a seamless manner.
Real-time analytics: Real-time analytics features provide information in its most recent state and update users as soon as it changes. This will prevent the need to continually update data sets and simplifies the use of streaming data.
Other features of data warehouse software: AI/ML Integration and Data Lake Integrations.
What are the Benefits of Data Warehouse Solutions?
Data warehouses pull data from multiple disparate sources across departments within an organization. This data flows from various CRM systems, financial systems, ERP software, and more in real time. They act as decision support systems that are designed to store historical data, further processed and transformed to make it available for decision makers to gain meaningful and valuable insights. These solutions provide a single source of truth for all the data within an organization to make data-driven decisions.
Improved BI: Organizations majorly use data warehouses to support their analytics and BI requirements. Data warehouses facilitate centralized data storage in a quick and easy-to-access manner which further benefits BI implementations through effective analytics and better business decision making. Thus, these solutions help gain fast, accurate, and relevant insights into their data.
Increased return on investment (ROI): Organizations achieve an increase in revenue due to cost savings. Deploying data warehouse solutions helps organizations consolidate data from multiple disparate sources in a specific high-quality format at one single repository, making it easily available to access and analyze better. Data warehousing solutions also help improve operational efficiency and productivity.
Provides competitive advantage: Data within data warehouses is pulled from multiple disparate sources from within an organization and stored in a standardized format, ready to be analyzed. This allows quick and easy access to data and helps save a lot of time in deriving insights. They enable data professionals to identify and evaluate key threats and opportunities through effective business data analysis.
Improves operational workflow: Data in a data warehouse is often transformed and cleaned before being loaded into it. This ensures that the data being used is good in quality and the insights generated from the data can be trusted to be accurate. This can improve the operational efficiency of businesses.
Who Uses Data Warehouse Solutions?
Data warehousing solutions focus on data relevant to business analytics and organize and optimize it to enable efficient analysis. This software provides an easy interface for business analysts.
Data analysts and data scientists: These employees use data warehouses to get a centralized view of data across an organization to gain valuable insights in terms of being able to answer questions required for strategic decision making.
Software Related to Data Warehouse Solutions
Related solutions that can be used together with data warehouses include:
Databases: Databases consist of a large family of tools used to store information digitally. There are a wide variety of databases such as relational databases software, object-oriented databases software, and graph databases. They can be used to store virtually any kind of data set, depending on their nature, but vary greatly between one another.
ETL tools: ETL is the most common way using which data is extracted from a data warehouse. These tools have long been used to facilitate the use of heterogeneous information sources and transform them into presentation-ready data formats.
Big data processing and distribution software: Big data processing and distribution software often work in tandem with data warehouses to process and distribute vast sums of information prior to storage. These tools help improve the warehouse’s scalability and processing power, which improves exploration compared to ETL tools.
Analytics platforms: To implement an effective and efficient analytics system, companies require well-structured and designed data warehouses. Data warehouses can be explained as solutions for data integration which further enable reporting and analytics. Data warehouses are an essential component of analytics systems; therefore a poorly-designed data warehouse can lead to lower value from the insights generated and further impact business decision-making measures. Analytics tools are associated with data warehousing in the form of reporting and analysis of information.
Challenges with Data Warehouse Solutions
Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
On-premises data warehouse solutions: On-premises data warehouse solutions require managing and maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure and services in-house. Organizations require dedicated teams to implement these solutions. On-premises data warehouses cannot upscale on demand. Thus, scaling up to meet changing requirements will move organizations to replace systems.
Data quality: Data comes in data warehouses from multiple sources within organizations. Inconsistent data like duplicates, and missing information can lead to encountering errors. Poor or error-prone data quality can result in inaccurate reports and insights, which can lead to poor decision-making.
How to Buy Data Warehouse Solutions
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Data Warehouse Software
If a company is just starting out and looking to purchase the first data warehouse solution, or maybe an organization needs to update a legacy system--wherever a business is in its buying process, g2.com can help select the best data warehouse software for the business.
The particular business pain points might be related to unstructured and disparate data sources that must be analyzed well to use it for decision-making. If the company has amassed a lot of data, the need is to look for a solution that can help organize and structure that data to create a centralized view for analysis. Users should think about the pain points and jot them down; these should be used to help create a checklist of criteria. Additionally, the buyer must determine the number of employees who will need to use this software, as this drives the number of licenses they are likely to buy.
Taking a holistic overview of the business and identifying pain points can help the team springboard into creating a checklist of criteria. The checklist serves as a detailed guide that includes both necessary and nice-to-have features including budget, features, number of users, integrations, security requirements, cloud or on-premises solutions, and more.
Depending on the scope of the deployment, it might be helpful to produce an RFI, a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from a data warehouse software.
Compare Data Warehouse Solutions Products
Create a long list
From meeting the business functionality needs to implementation, vendor evaluations are an essential part of the software buying process. For ease of comparison after all demos are complete, it helps to prepare a consistent list of questions regarding specific needs and concerns to ask each vendor.
Create a short list
From the long list of vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list of vendors and come up with a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this list in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the features and pricing of the various solutions.
Conduct demos
To ensure the comparison is thoroughgoing, the user should demo each solution on the shortlist with the same use case and datasets. This will allow the business to evaluate like for like and see how each vendor stacks up against the competition.
Selection of Data Warehouse Solutions
Choose a selection team
Before getting started, it's crucial to create a winning team that will work together throughout the entire process, from identifying pain points to implementation. The software selection team should consist of members of the organization who have the right interest, skills, and time to participate in this process. A good starting point is to aim for three to five people who fill roles such as the main decision maker, project manager, process owner, system owner, or staffing subject matter expert, as well as a technical lead, IT administrator, or security administrator. In smaller companies, the vendor selection team may be smaller, with fewer participants multitasking and taking on more responsibilities.
Negotiation
Just because something is written on a company’s pricing page, does not mean it is gospel (although some companies will not budge). It is imperative to open up a conversation regarding pricing and licensing. For example, the vendor may be willing to give a discount for multi-year contracts or for recommending the product to others.
Final decision
After this stage, and before going all in, it is recommended to roll out a test run or pilot program to test adoption with a small sample size of users. If the tool is well used and well received, the buyer can be confident that the selection was correct. If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
What Does Data Warehouse Solutions Cost?
Data warehouse solutions are often sold as standalone products. They can be integrated with other BI and analytics tools. These typically come in two types of pricing models—flat rate and on demand.
Implementation of Data Warehouse Solutions
How are Data Warehouse Solutions Implemented?
An organization could either decide to buy a commercial data warehouse or build an in-house data warehouse. Either way requires proper planning in terms of architecture and aligning the data warehouse project to the company goals because the end purpose is to obtain valuable insights for business leaders for strategic decision-making.
Data warehouse implementation can be done in the following ways: enterprise data warehouse, operational data store, and data mart.
Operational data store: An operational database (ODS) is designed to handle current operational data. The insights derived from this data primarily support the improvement of operational processes.
Enterprise data warehouse (EDW): This is a centralized data repository that collects enterprise data from multiple sources across the enterprise and makes it available for analysis to provide actionable insights.
Data mart: It can be considered as a subset of a data warehouse. It is focused on a specific division of business like sales, marketing, and finance. Data marts deliver data in small sets or partitions to provide easy and efficient access.
Who is Responsible for Data Warehouse Solution Implementation?
The deployment of a data warehouse requires the participation of multiple stakeholders. Some of them are as follows:
C-suite executives: These sets of people help users understand the long-term goals and strategies of an organization with regard to the data projects. They play a major role in scoping the data projects along with the project managers and the data team to help them understand what kind of data can be valuable to the organization for decision making.
Project managers: They are responsible for overseeing the overall project in terms of budget, schedules, deadlines, and project roadblocks. The project manager is assigned with the task to communicate the progress of the project to the senior management.
IT team: These teams consist of business analysts, technical architects, ETL experts, and specialists. This team plays a role in supporting the data projects helping execute activities like developing the data warehouse, connecting data sources, executing ETL processes, and more. They may be required to support the system if it’s an on-premises deployment.
What Does the Implementation Process Look Like for Data Warehouse Solutions?
The implementation process of a data warehouse solution can be broken down into the following steps:
Gathering and defining requirements: This step involves understanding the organization’s long-term business strategies and goals. It also covers various other criteria in terms of the kind of analysis and reporting required, as well as hardware, software, testing, implementation, and training of users. This step involves multiple stakeholders starting from the C-suite decisions, data, and analytics team, IT support, and the data governance team.
Data warehouse environment: As the next step, users must decide which deployment model is suitable: on-premises, public or private cloud, or hybrid cloud. Public cloud is considered one of the least expensive models as the cloud provider takes care of managing and maintenance of the infrastructure hardware requirements.
Data modeling: One of the crucial steps in data warehouse implementation is deciding on the data model. Every data source has a specific data scheme, picking up a single schema that is a fit for all is required.
Connecting data sources through ETL process: This step includes data extraction from multiple disparate sources, transforming it through converting the data from the source schema to the assigned destination schema and further loading it into the data warehouses. Transformation of the data also includes a couple of other actions that can be performed on the dataset like validation, enrichment, and other data health measures.
Integration to BI and analytics tools: Once a data warehouse system is set up, the next step involves integrating the BI tool being used by the organization with the warehouse data. This facilitates reporting and analytics which leads to delivering faster and easy insights for better decision making.
Testing and validating the system: This step includes the end-to-end testing of the entire data warehouse system. The system can be tested on various sets of parameters like data quality and integrity checks, the performance of the system, and analyzing whether it fulfills the end-user requirements in terms of reporting and analytics.
Data Warehouse Solutions Trends
Shifting to cloud data warehousing solutions
Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud data warehouses to achieve improved scalability and performance. This shift helps them focus more on managing their business activities than managing a server block. Cloud data warehouse solutions also let organizations access easy real-time data from multiple sources, enabling them to gain better insights quickly. Companies can also achieve cost-effectiveness with data warehouses deployed on the cloud because it’s less expensive to scale a cloud data warehouse than one deployed on-premises. Also, buyers end up paying for the resources that they use, which further improves operational efficiency.
Moving towards DWaaS
Organizations are moving towards data warehouse as a service (DWaaS) as it lets buyers take advantage of eliminating hardware and software procurement, configuration, and maintenance work as a third party is responsible for these. Starting from data warehouse administration to setting up a data warehouse team, the providers are responsible for it.
