Data Warehousing
Business intelligence, as we know it today, would not be possible without the data warehouse. At its core, business intelligence is the ability to answer complex questions about your data and use those answers to make informed business decisions. In order to do this well, you need a data warehouse, which not only provides a safe way to centralize and store all your data but also a method to quickly find the answers you need, when you need them.
A data warehouse collects and stores data from various sources. Housing or storing the data in a digital “warehouse” is similar to storing documents or photos on the cloud.
Having a place to store your data makes it easier to use and provides more insights, but on a larger scale. You can import historical data or timely data feeds to report the most recent and integrated data. You can use a data warehouse for analytical purposes and business reporting. However, to make full use of all of your data, you should create an integrated data strategy and an authentic audience story. We recommend combining your data warehouse with your other business intelligence practices.
Benefit of Services
Organizations have a common goal – to make better business decisions. A data warehouse, once implemented into your business intelligence framework, can benefit your company in numerous ways. A data warehouse:
- Delivers enhanced business intelligence
- Saves times
- Enhances data quality and consistency
- Generates a high Return on Investment (ROI)
- Provides competitive advantage
- Improves the decision-making process
- Enables organizations to forecast with confidence
- Streamlines the flow of information
What Is Included
In business intelligence, data warehouses serve as the backbone of data storage. Business intelligence relies on complex queries and comparing multiple sets of data to inform everything from everyday decisions to organization-wide shifts in focus.
To facilitate this, business intelligence is comprised of three overarching activities: data wrangling, data storage, and data analysis. Data wrangling is usually facilitated by extract, transform, load (ETL) technologies.
- Data warehouse allows business users to quickly access critical data from some sources all in one place.
- Data warehouse provides consistent information on various cross-functional activities. It is also supporting ad-hoc reporting and query.
- Data Warehouse helps to integrate many sources of data to reduce stress on the production system.
- Data warehouse helps to reduce total turnaround time for analysis and reporting.
- Restructuring and Integration make it easier for the user to use for reporting and analysis.
- Data warehouse allows users to access critical data from the number of sources in a single place. Therefore, it saves user’s time of retrieving data from multiple sources.
- Data warehouse stores a large amount of historical data. This helps users to analyze different time periods and trends to make future predictions.
While data warehouses store data, business intelligence platforms analyze data. When you get these two systems to work together seamlessly, you’ll unlock the full benefits of business intelligence.
Business intelligence tools fulfill the “data analysis” stage of business intelligence, but they get their name because they’re the culmination of the other two steps: data wrangling and data storage.
First, business intelligence tools integrate with many different sources, including your data warehouse. They then provide an easy way to query the data in order to analyze data for trends and insights. Then, they make it easy to visualize and share data using dashboards and reports.
These three steps, built on top of a good data warehouse foundation, will make it easier to follow through on the core promise of business intelligence: providing everyone in your organization with the ability to understand and act on data.