There is a huge volume of data and vital information companies generate now. Collection, digestion, storage, and usage of such data now becomes an operational and logistical nightmare for many organizations. There are many ways of storing data and protecting it to be accessed in a fluidic and remote way. Effective usage of data is now one of the basic pillars of success for any organization, both in terms of progressive decision-making and personalized response to the customers.
In the modern globalized marketplace, big data management is the key to be competent. With the customers, employees, vendors, and stakeholders spread across different countries and cities, data needs to be managed more efficiently to react to the highly fluctuating market conditions.
In light of this growing need for database management, at a certain point in the growth of an organization, when growth sustains, and there is a need to think of expansion, the next challenge arises. At this point, administrators and managers may be confused as to whether to continue with their primary database management system or to consider an upgrade to the data warehouse. It pops up as a big question about when to move from one type of storage system to a more elaborated one?
As any company starts to accumulate big data from various sources, the tasks and analysis needs grow multifold. Maintaining many databases scattered across various departments and functions may be a big burden. Querying every database without any functionality to cross-analyze is deemed a highly incompetent, slow, insecure, and costly burden.
When such an elaborated and integrated storage of all enterprise data becomes a pressing need for taking the company to the next level, the primary solution ad recommended by the system analysts and database experts is moving to a data warehouse.
Why data warehouse?
Data warehouse or DWH is a database at a larger scale that is meant to store, extract, and analyze enterprise data of various types as customers, suppliers, vendors, employees, marketing, finance, administration, and so on. These systems are effectively developed to work with the big data stores and allow users to visualize and analyze information simultaneously. There is no need to query different databases to mix further or consolidate the results to get data-driven insights using big data.
By default, data warehouses are designed to facilitate big data analytics and complex query processing from live transactional processes. So, warehousing allows companies to grow multifold in their analytical capabilities with no adverse impact on their transactional processes or day-to-day operations.Setting up a data warehouse is a technology-intensive process, for which you can get the assistance of providers like RemoteDBA.com.
A data warehouse is also recommended if you want the basic inexperienced users accessing your databases not to put any risk on your company’s critical information. Given that the warehouses use a three-tier architecture for data management, data warehouse users can query the data stores without affecting the operations of underlying data systems. We can find three levels in the architecture of a typical data warehouse system.
Lower level – This is the layer of the underlying server, where all the data is stored.
Intermediate level – This layer consists of the analysis engine toaccess the data.
The upper level – tit is the front-end of the database layer, which presents data analysis results using data visualization tools.
Data warehouse advantages
A data warehouse is an indispensable tool for any organization that wants to use its data for analytics and decision making. It facilities proper functioning of business intelligence tools, analytical applications, and SQL clients, etc. In addition to these, some other notable advantages of data warehousing are:
- It separates analysis and processing of big data from the normal transactional DBs and thereby improves these distinct systems’ performance.
- Data warehouse helps to consolidate big data from many sources and effectively process the same.
- It can bring in greater data quality, accuracy, and consistency, which can help in more effective management decisions.
- Since all relevant data is stored in the centralized warehouse, higher data quality and availability are guaranteed. This approach will also reduce the time needed to generate reports and optimize the analytical processes.
- It also helps to eliminate any duplicate records, inconsistencies, and errors in the information.
- Increase the data consistency in the reporting through centralizing and standardizing data sources of various departments and processes.
Local server or cloud?
Enterprises can install their data warehouses on the on-premises server or the cloud warehouse. Cloud is becoming so common lately as it will let organizations address the warehousing needs in a scalable and practical way. Further, let us explore some advantages of setting up a data warehouse on the cloud.
- Better security is ensured on the cloud throughout the warehouse lifecycle. Cloud services monitor the daily updates and always keep their backup and security protocols up to date.
- Scalability is much easier and quicker in the case of cloud data warehouses.
- Cloud solutions are much cheaper and flexible. There is no need for the users to bear any up-front hardware or software costs or to avail any proprietary licenses to avail services on the cloud.
- Installation of data warehouse on cloud and commissioning it is much faster and easier than hectic on-premises implementation.
- Cloud services also connect much easily to various supportive services on the cloud, ensuring much greater efficiency.
On the other hand, installing aData warehouse on a local server has some advantages as to avoiding latency in data transactions and can offer the administrators greater control over the enterprise databases. However, organizations need to have highly qualified warehouse professionals to administer and state-of-the-art infrastructure and hardware to control a data warehouse fully internally.
Based on your data’s nature and criticality, you may decide whether to plan for setting up a data warehouse hosted at the local enterprise servers or to avail of a good cloud vendor. Remote DBA services can offer you fully protected database administration and monitoring support and help you set up functional data warehouses.
