Data Warehousing: The new way to business insights

Information is the new currency in today’s technologically advancing world. Growing at an exponential rate, data has become the key to understand the customer and offer better services as a business. However, this can only be possible if a business is able to gather valuable insights from heaps of data. To make this process easier, experts at Bhavyam Infotech, a global IT Consulting firm, explain the types, and benefits of the latest data technique called Data Warehousing:-

What is Data Warehousing?

Data Warehousing is a technique for gathering and organizing data from various different sources in a manner that helps a business utilize the collection to improve its products and services. Better known as decision support or executive information system, the method is essentially used to simplify the process of data analysis and create a database that becomes the fundamental block of business decision making.

Types

The aim of using Data Warehousing is to gather actionable business intelligence with the help of customer database and data mining. However, experts at Bhavyam Infotech state that, there are three major types of data warehouse employed according to the business needs, which include:

Operational Data Store (ODS)

One of the most used data warehouse types, ODS is employed for managing the data of regular activities such as product entry in a department store, employee timing records, etc. This type is primarily used because of its ability to update the warehouse data in real time.

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)

EDW is used when the data warehouse is treated like a central database by the organization. It organizes the data and represents it with a unified scheme along with the option of segregating data on the basis of different parameters. This type plays an important role in the decisions of any business facet.

(also read: Business Intelligence – The need of transforming data to meaningful information)

Data Mart (DM)

Data Mart is a unique type of data warehouse that is dedicatedly used for sales, finance, or their combination.

Benefits

Businesses that use Data Warehousing as a regular practice state the following advantages of the technique:

• Due to its large storage capacity, analysis of data from different time frames becomes easy, which can be treated as the grounds for future predictions
• It helps to avoid the hassle of individually accessing and collecting data from various sources
• As a result, the time of analysis decreases, which reduces the product launch time
• Data organization via warehousing technique supports query handling and ad-hoc reporting
• Information consistency across different departments of a business is maintained

So, if an organization is looking to revamp their decision making approach without reducing their dependency on data, data warehousing is currently one of the most effective techniques in the business world.