Data warehousing, a technique of consolidating all of your organisational data into one place for easier access and better analytics, is every business stakeholder’s dream. However, setting up a data warehouse is a significantly complex task, and even before taking your first steps, you should be utterly sure about the answer to these two questions:
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Your organisation’s goals
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Your detailed roadmap to building a data warehouse
Either of these questions, if left unanswered, can cost your organisation a lot in the long run. It’s a relatively newer technology, and you’re going to create a lot of scope for errors if you’re not aware of your organisation’s specific needs and requirements. These errors can render your warehouse highly inaccurate. What’s worse is that an erroneous data warehouse is worse than not having data at all and an unplanned strategy might end up doing you more bad than good.
Because there are different approaches to developing data warehouses and each depends on the size and needs of organisations, it’s not possible to create a one-shoe-fits-all plan.
Having said that, let’s try to lay out a sample roadmap that’ll help you develop a robust and efficient data warehouse for your organisation:
Setting up a Data Warehouse
Data Warehouse is extremely helpful when organizing large amounts of data to retrieve and analyse efficiently. For the same reason, extreme care should be taken to ensure that the data is rapidly accessible. One approach to designing the system is by using dimensional modelling – a method that allows large volumes of data to be efficiently and quickly queried and examined. Since most of the data present in data warehouses are historical and stable – in a sense, it doesn’t change frequently, there is hardly a need to employ repetitive backup methods. Instead, once any data is added, the entire warehouse can be backed up at once – instead of backing up routinely.
Data warehousing tools can be broadly classified into four categories:
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Extraction tools,
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Table management tools,
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Query management tools, and
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Data integrity tools.
Each of these tools come in extremely handy at different stages of development of the Data Warehouse. Research on your part will help you understand more about these tools, and will allow you to can pick the ones which suit your needs.
Key Concepts of Data Warehousing: An Overview
Now, let’s look at a sample roadmap that’ll help you build a more robust and insightful warehouse for your organisation:
Evaluate your objectives
The first step in setting up your organisation’s data warehouse is to evaluate your goals. We’ve mentioned this earlier, but we can’t stress this enough. Most of the organisations lose out on valuable insights just because they lack a clear picture of their company’s objectives, requirements, and goals. For instance, if you’re a company looking for your first significant breakthrough, you might want to engage your customers in building rapport – so, you’ll need to follow a different approach than an organisation that’s well established and now wants to use the data warehouse for improving their operations. Bringing a data warehouse in-house is a big step for any organisation and should be performed only after some due diligence on your part.
Analyse current technological systems
By asking your customers and business stakeholders pointed questions, you can gather insights on how your current technical system is performing, the challenges it’s facing, and the improvements possible. Further, they can even find out how suitable their current technology stack is – thereby efficiently deciding whether it is to be kept or replaced. Various department of your organisation can contribute to this by providing reports and feedback.
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