Data Warehouses
The ever increasing torrent of data being captured by companies and organisations presents new
ongoing challenges in terms of how its gathered, stored and analysed: the decision as to how to
set up data storage and analytics is an important one to get right.
Reach out to discuss how a data warehouse could benefit you…
A data warehouse is not another tool in your toolbox, but rather a foundation for creating a data-driven culture in your organisation.
It is the hub to provide meaningful analytics through accurate storage and categorisation of data, which can be analysed quickly and accurately to breed data confidence throughout the organisation.
Karen Harding
Head of Marketing & Client Relations, Objective
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The Data Storage and Analysis Challenge
You may have heard and be familiar with terms such as ‘data warehouse’ or ‘data lake,’ but what roles do they play in data use?
In a nutshell a data warehouse is designed to offer a repository to not only store data but enable meaningful analysis, so performing more than simply a data storage function.
The data warehouse incorporates some or all of these typical elements:
- A relational database to store and manage data
- A solution for extracting and transforming data so preparing it for analysis
- Data mining, reporting and statistical analysis capability
- Analytics tools to present data in easily digestible form – for example clear visuals
- Other applications to produce meaningful insights through using tech such as AI (Artificial intelligence) and machine learning-based algorithms
Working with you…
Your friendly, accessible team of data scientists and analysts are skilled at analysing complex data. They will help you utilise business intelligence platforms, build predictive models, and apply machine learning to explore and interrogate your data in real time.
Tell us what you want to achieve. By talking through your data concerns, frustrations, and challenges, as well as what your desired output looks like, enables us to work in synergy. Helping you unlock the value in your data to guide and support strategic business decisions.
We look forward to working with you.
Data Warehouse Solutions: Not Just Data Storage
So, it is evident that ‘data warehouse’ isn’t simply data storage but could be more accurately described as ‘data warehouse solutions’. Data is centralised and consolidated from multiple sources and provides powerful analytical capabilities to allow your business or organisation to gain important and highly useful insights to improve long or short-term decision making and policy development.
A ‘data lake’ by comparison is a more basic solution: here unfiltered and uncategorised data from various sources – for instance social media, apps and IoT (Internet of Things) devices – is more loosely stored for later use.
The format and structure of the various data sets contained in the ‘lake’ are determined at the time of analysis – which could be some time later – as opposed to being categorised straight away as is the case with the data warehouse.
Making the Most of Data Warehouse Solution
While Big Data itself is relatively new in terms of the sharp increase in data capture from more and varied sources, data warehouse itself dates back to the 1980s although the scope of data being gathered, stored, and analysed has developed considerably since.
For businesses and organisations a key decision is in how best to set up their data warehouse solutions or, if they have this facility already, how best to develop it and ensure its meeting their current needs and its suitability to handle future demands.
To this end consulting with data warehouse services professionals is a worthwhile move for your business to create a solution to make the most of their data relevant to specific needs. The architecture of a data warehouse they would create for you is based on your specific requirements – not a simple ‘cookie cut’ solution that everyone else uses.
There are various options in terms of commercially available systems to build your data warehouse on: you may have heard of labels such as ‘Azure data warehouse’ or ‘Azure SQL data warehouse’ – these refer to Microsoft’s data warehouse solutions packages.
Microsoft’s solution is a SQL data warehouse using, as its name suggests, the familiar SQL database language.