Which Data Warehouse is Right For Your Business?

A data warehouse is a collection of information from the past that allows analysts to analyze data from different sources to get actionable insights. A data warehouse can be installed on premises or in the cloud. Which option you choose is contingent on your business’s needs and other aspects such as scalability cost, resources, control and security.

Data warehouses are designed for storing large amounts of historical enterprise data and performing in-depth data analysis for reporting and business intelligence (BI). They can store relational as well as nonrelational information. They are typically structured, meaning that the data is loaded, extracted and transformed (ELT) to meet pre-defined schemas before it is stored, which makes running queries against them much simpler than executing them directly against operational source systems.

Traditional data warehouses that are on premises require expensive equipment and software to host them. They have a limited storage capacity when compared to the compute power, and they must regularly discard older data in order to make room for more recent data. A data warehouse allows you to run queries on historical data that aren’t possible in operational systems, since they only refresh using real-time data.

A cloud-based, data store or managed service is fully automated and a highly performant solution. It is ideal for organizations who need to analyze large amounts of data over the long term. It is usually a more economical alternative to on-premise data warehouses, since it eliminates the need to invest in large servers and offers flexible pricing. You can pay by the hour or throughput, or a review fixed amount of resources.