A data warehouse is a central repository that contains a copy of the data stored in multiple corporate sources. This data is later used for analyzing business data and supporting decision-making processes. In many companies a data warehouse serves as the heart of their individual Corporate Performance Management strategies. 

The design of a data warehouse is based on two guiding principles:

1.     Integrating data from disparate, heterogeneous databases to create a single version of the truth and enable comprehensive analysis

2.     Separating operational business data from management data for reporting, decision support and analysis 

... and why do I need that?

Excellent question. There is ample literature on this very topic – not to mention many different views on the “one true” methodology and implementation. Our experience shows that the pragmatic approach of building smaller data marts for one single purpose (e.g. enterprise planning) can be beneficial. Sooner or later, however, most companies will expand their activities into the performance management spectrum at which point a data warehouse approach will be necessary. For this reason, we create well-structured architectures from business as well as technical points of view for even the smallest of data marts to ensure future system scalability.

Extracting, transforming, ...

During the ETL process, data and metadata structures are extracted from different sources, transformed (i.e. cleaned and standardized) and then loaded into a data warehouse. This process is executed on a regular schedule so that the data warehouse contains the widest breadth of information over the longest possible time frames and ultimately enables powerful comparative analysis and transparent planning criteria.   

A model data warehouse architecture contains a staging area, ODS and star schema. That not only sounds complicated, it sometimes really is! Integrating different types of IT systems is always a challenging task. Our experts can help!

Closing the gap to real-time information 

Over the years companies have increased their load cycles so that their data warehouses contain virtually real-time information from the source systems. This allows them to analyze the latest information without hindering the performance of operational systems. Companies in retail, telecommunications or other industries that need to closely monitor daily business activities can then act upon emerging trends and events more quickly and effectively.