Data warehousing is a common practice for many businesses these days. It is the time that you understand what it is and why it matters. With this, you can finally steer your business to a new level of success.
So, what is data warehousing?
Data warehousing refers to electronic storage (called data warehouse) that keeps a large amount of business data. With this, it is considered a crucial component of business intelligence.
How does data warehousing work?
Data warehousing is utilised to provide a greater awareness into the performance of a business by comparing data collected from many heterogeneous sources. Typically, a data warehouse is created to run query and analysis especially on historical data extracted from transactional sources.
After the data has been incorporated into the data warehouse, it cannot be altered because it only runs analytics on events that already happened. The data warehouse should store information in a secure, reliable and easy to retrieve manner.
How is a data warehouse created?
A data warehouse is created in the following manner:
- Data extraction: the first step is data extraction that involves collecting large amounts of
- Data cleaning: after compiling the data, it goes through data cleaning. This is the process of filtering the data for errors and then correcting or even excluding any errors that are found.
- Data transformation: after the cleaning, the data will be converted from a database format to a warehouse format.
- Data loading: once the data is stored in the warehouse, it goes through sorting, consolidating and summarising. This way, it will be more synchronised and easier to utilise.
- Refreshing: as time goes by, there will be more data added to the warehouse especially during the updating of multiple data sources.
Why data warehousing matters to your business?
Here’s why data warehousing matters to your business:
- It improves business intelligence: the improved access to information allows leaders to make decisions based on complete information.
- It increases query and system performance: a data warehouse is created with analysis and speed of data retrieval. With this, it will allow business stakeholders to store large amounts of data and quickly query it. However, you have to understand that data warehouses are specifically built for analysis and retrieval – not for the upkeep of individual records.
- It offers timely access to data: with data warehousing, business leaders have access to data from different sources as needed. When it comes to the actual retrieval process, only a small amount of time is spent. An important aspect of warehousing is scheduled data integration.
- It improves quality: the deployment of data warehouse comprises of data conversion from different sources and transforming into common formats. This simply means that the data is standardised thereby improving quality and consistency.
- It paves the way to high return on investment: more importantly, data warehousing supports your business to generate higher profits because of cost savings.
Final words
In essence, data warehousing solves the continuing problem of analysing different data and converting it into actionable information that you can use for more effective decision-making. Keep in mind that when you successfully implement a data warehouse system, your business can reap all its benefits.
