It’s more imperative than ever for businesses of any size to take advantage of the data at their disposal. Analytics and real-time data management are crucial for organizations to understand not only their inner workings but deduce from the findings to understand a customer base as well. One way in which this is accomplished is through the use of a data warehouse to bring traditional data sources into the digital revolution.
What is a data warehouse?
Being able to comb through raw data of any size can be a cumbersome activity, but there are tools like a data warehouse that can prove beneficial. A data warehouse is a data management structure in which an architectural layer sits on top of a traditional model, enabling access to diverse data sources while appearing as one consolidated source to users. It’s essentially an analytical data architecture that optimizes the likes of databases and data lakes, as well as other data sources like web services and applications to meet every analytics use case.
Also known as a logical data warehouse, or LDW, it’s considered the next generation of data capability allowing companies to meet their growing data management needs. Combining multiple engines and various data sources, data warehouse components go through a process of consolidation that puts them in one place logically instead of physically. An LDW has advanced to support a wide variety of available data source systems and business use cases. This helps organizations digitally reinvent, enabling real-time streaming analytics, and optimizing workload.
How can a data warehouse be used?
Logical data warehouses are characterized by their application access through a single user-friendly interface. Modern LDW tools are allowing business analysts to navigate companies through the 21st century, with the existing enterprise data warehouse remaining for extraction. These warehouses contain one or more data lakes as repositories, ensuring consistency with data marts while setting metadata and governance policies. This technology is beneficial to a variety of sectors to make sure that they are making business decisions for the better of a business based on analytical reports.
In the insurance sector, data warehouses are used to assess risk management that can determine the insurability of certain business lines. Through predictive analytics, warehouses offer assistance with handling insurance claims at a greater pace, allowing analysts and adjusters to avoid having to comb through large volumes of data. Data mining through warehouses can help gain new insights from information held in a large database management system. This lets retailers, financial institutions, and other sectors conduct market research by analyzing user behavior to make business decisions.
How can a data warehouse benefit a business?
Whether it’s the need to monitor a supply chain or understand transactional systems, data warehouses are incredibly beneficial no matter the various sources at your disposal. The logical data warehouse approach allows companies to meet evolving data requirements while taking advantage of existing analytic applications. This includes enterprise data warehouses to help to manage business data. Companies can make decisions on specific data, even for a complex query, with a data virtualization layer that incorporates new data sources without disrupting any existing business processes.
By modernizing an approach to data in any line of business, a data warehouse allows companies to conduct analytics and gain business insights through diverse data types and use cases. LDW can help a business scale its data management strategy as it grows, avoiding any inconsistencies or redundancies throughout. This empowers data consumers by making data easier to find and understand in real time. A data warehouse can improve productivity for all business users. This can be crucial to building better business decisions across every single department of an organization.