A pre-built data warehouse - Yes, please!

A data warehouse is a necessity in most analytics projects, but at the same time, it is one of the highest costs during the project. In addition to building the data warehouse also, maintenance takes time and money that could be saved by using a pre-built solution. This article argues why you should not build your own data warehouse anymore in the 2020s.

Data warehouse - the modern backbone of the analytics project

Data warehousing allows you to store data statistically from many different sources and significantly eliminates the load on the reporting tool. It reduces, for example, the loading times of the reports. A modern data warehouse is also a requirement for building large data models.

The data can be brought into the warehouse along many different data tubes at any chosen time-frequency. The data tubes can be built in several different ways with data warehouse-independent technology and without restrictions on the communication methods provided by the source system. Whether the method is REST, SOAP, SFTP, database, on-Prem, or cloud, there is a solution.

The data warehouse can also be used to model, aggregate, and process data further efficiently for the analytics tools. This enables more efficient and usable reporting as most heavy computing is done before the analytics tool.

Why should you consider using a pre-built data warehouse?

Traditionally building the data warehouse takes from weeks to even a half a year, depending on the source system. In addition to the thousands of euros and work hours spent on building the data warehouse also, continuous maintenance takes resources. Those building and maintaining costs could be reduced significantly in many cases by using, for example, BI Book’s pre-built data warehouse.

BI Book tool provides its users with a pre-built data warehouse and integrations for over 50 systems. This enables reducing the costs of the analytics projects significantly as well as saving time. BI Book has helped its users to deploy top-level analytics in weeks or even days instead of months.

Of course, in some cases, building your own data warehouse is the only possible solution. Especially if the company operates in highly closed IT environments or the data is very sensitive, it might be better to build your own data warehouse that serves its individual needs.

How does BI Book’s pre-built data warehouse help you reduce costs?

Building an efficiently working data warehouse that is easy to maintain requires a lot of effort and expertise. There are also many IT security things to consider when building it. The BI Book’s pre-built data warehouse is often the most cost-efficient solution for two reasons. First, you do not have to spend time on planning, building, and configuring. Second, you do not have to spend time maintaining the data warehouse itself or the data pipelines and integrations related to it - we do it on your behalf.

Also, the source system’s vendors may make changes to various interfaces, and it has an impact on the data warehouses. With BI Book, you do not need to worry about those changes because the maintenance belongs to the same solid monthly fee.

The third remarkable benefit of using BI Book’s data warehouse is the ready-built data models. The productized data warehouses on different systems have already been developed so far that the end-user only has to feed in the tables and click the relations between them based on the pre-thought key relationships. This way, the end-user does not need to worry about normalizing the data and converting the transaction data into reasonable data models - they are already pre-built in the solution.

We already have a data warehouse, so what’s the fuss?

As we have discussed, building a data warehouse can be quite costly. Because of this, you can achieve significant savings in your future analytics projects using pre-built data warehouses. Let’s imagine a scenario where you want to do financial analytics against your general ledger. Normally the data modeling and setting up of the data warehouse would take you weeks or months.

Alternatively, you can use the data warehouse you have already built alongside a pre-built solution from BI Book. This way, the project time can be minimized to mere hours, and you benefit from the entities built by our experienced Data Analysts and Engineers - and the pipelines are still connected to one place.

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