Part One — Building A Data Warehouse

Nowadays, everyone wants to build a data warehouse. But does one really need it? Even if you need it, how do you know you’re building the right thing and when are you really going to start to reaping early benefits from it?

But first things first, what is a data warehouse? Simply put, it’s a single place where you can store data from all sources. It helps one answer the questions that require complex analysis involving data from multiple sources. You can also build a data warehouse in a fashion that you get your most frequent data requirements taken care of quickly.

A year ago, we were struggling with this question at UpGrad — to build or not to build a data warehouse?

In order to answer this, and many other such questions, we talked to a lot of other people who had done it before. The first thing that we noticed was that to build a data warehouse (or DW), you need the right team of data engineers, architects, analysts and product managers. The first question we asked was — is it really worth that much investment?

To find the right answer, we need to ask ourselves the right set of questions. These questions might take a good deal of time and energy, but once you are done with these, you will be far more confident about whether to move ahead with DW or not. Here, we’ll provide the answers we got from our own exercise to enhance your understanding, and hopefully aid you in this process of deciding whether or not to set up your own data warehouse.

Question #1: What answers do you want to get from analytics/data? And at what frequency?

As you must have noted already, this is the most important question of all. You must involve other teams (Sales, Marketing, Business) while answering these questions to make sure you don’t miss anything.

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