Understanding the Roles of Data Warehouse & ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
If you have a look at the current and upcoming trends in the IT industry and technology landscape, you’ll likely come across the term ‘data warehousing’.
The concept of data warehousing, in its simplest sense, can be explained as follows: it extracts data from source systems, and cleanly formatted, validated, reorganized, summarized, and supplemented, these data then is moved to a dedicated server, a data warehouse.
This warehouse will become the main source of valuable information that is ready to use for reports and analysis.
Yet, not many companies implement data warehousing since quite a number of those companies deem that this solution won’t bring much change to data processing and cannot solve the ongoing problems. 
Data warehousing can be understood as a place where companies store their valuable data assets such as customer data, sales data, employee data. Furthermore, data warehousing is the single source of data truth, which is the practice of structuring all the best quality data in one place. It is usually created and used primarily for data reporting and analysis purposes.
To have a better understanding of data warehousing, let’s have a look at its practical use:
Taking marketing for an example, if you ask anyone who works in this domain, they are probably already familiar with Google Analytics, Facebook Offline Conversion, Ad networks, and other CRM solutions; however, some of which have caused several tiny issues that somewhat irritate marketers.
With so many data sources, multichannel advertising, business leads all becoming such a welter. Data warehousing is a solution that allows your business to integrate data from multiple applications and sources into one location and provides an environment for decision making and support, data mining, analytics reporting.
Is Data Warehouse A Must for Businesses?
It is not a must-have to employ a data warehousing solution in your company but it is necessary for a more effective working pace and processes. Warehousing solves problems by providing help in analyzing separate data and converting it into actionable and accessible information as well as processing a huge amount of complicated data with an effective approach.
Even though a significant percentage of businesses claim that implementing and managing data warehousing is not pleasing, if you manage to successfully implement a data warehouse system, the benefits it brings will be a game-changer to your business.
Here are the benefits it brings!
#1 Enhancing business intelligence
Data warehousing allows business leaders to access valuable information from various sources from a significant single platform, there is no place for decisions made based on incomplete and limited data.
Business leaders can make quick decisions 100 percent based on data-driven facts and supported by relevant information that their businesses have gathered over months or years. Additionally, data warehouses can be employed to businesses’ processes effortlessly like market segmentation, sales, inventory, sales, and financial management.
#2 Increased query and system performance
Data warehouse system allows businesses to store large amounts of data and query it. These systems are designed with speed of data retrieval and analysis rather than upkeep and focus on creating and modifying data.
#3 Enhanced quality and consistency
Since data warehouse systems convert data from various sources into a single platform and in a consistent format, these data from across business units are standardized, for example, sales and marketing, and operations departments will all use the same data depository for queries and reports; therefore, all departments will produce results that are consistent.
#4 Timely access to data
When employing warehouse systems in businesses, a small amount of time is spent on the retrieval process since it allows users and business leaders to have access to data from multiple channels as needed. Data are standardized, preserved, stored, consolidated, and integrated.
Critical data is available to all users, this way, users and business owners can make informed decisions on key aspects. Moreover, executives can query data themselves and need little to no support from IT departments. Plenty of time and money are saved.
#5 High return on investment
Time and cost savings generating a high amount of revenue lead to a higher Return on Investment (ROI). The practice of warehousing has been around for a while and has proved that analytic projects have a significant impact on businesses’ financial performance.
#6 Allowing businesses to forecast
Data analysts can analyze business data with confidence. Based on the critical consolidated information, they can make market forecasts, identify potential KPIs and estimate the results.
What is ETL and why is it important?
When companies handle big data, they always need analytic data that is available within a hand’s reach to make the most accurate data-driven decisions.
As we have mentioned, data warehousing plays a big role in providing businesses with information, but to be more specific, this valuable source of information is provided through ETL.
ETL, an abbreviation for Extract - Transform - Load is the heart of data warehousing. ETL performs data cleaning during the extraction process and loads significant data into the data warehouse.
The whole process full description is simplified as follow:
Firstly, data is read within a database. This stage involves data collection and extraction. Extracted data from various sources systems is stored in the staging area, not the data warehouse because extracted data is in various formats and can be corrupted. No SQL, XML, and flat files into the staging area.
The next step is transformation. The extracted data is transformed from its old structure into a more denormalized format. These formats are a more proper format for analysis and storage. This stage involves processes and tasks like filtering, cleaning, joining, splitting, sorting.
The last stage involves the load function in which the process of writing the transformed data is implemented. Data has now loaded into the new application or database.
Regardless of the business size, level of complexity, and the number of data sources, companies will always benefit from better access to their data, especially extracted, well-organized data.
ETLs are designed to manage and scale up to huge volumes of data, without risking errors due to the size of the dataset.
Leveraging ETL service will save businesses plenty of time, effort, and money without compromising flexibility and scalability. Moreover, with ETL tools, companies need less help from IT teams and as a result, the IT department can focus 100 percent of their efforts on other tasks.
The commonly used ETL tools are Sybase, CloverETL, and MarkLogic.
What we offer:
Your business IT teams can easily handle data and stuff, but more sources and data have skyrocketed now and your team will definitely hardly find time to change and format data every single day along with other tasks. The potential of all information remains too often untapped (variety of data sources, formats, huge volumes of data) makes your team's job even more difficult. Understanding the struggles, here at TP&P Technology, we provide you:
Integration solution
By accessing your data source, no matter wherever your data might be stored, in whatever format and from whichever data source, we’ll help you in organizing all the information your business needs and uses together.
End-to-End security
We provide a high-speed, well-structured, and secure data warehouse that is protected 24/7 by electronic access control, video surveillance, and alarm systems. At TP&P Technology, we deliver security to our customers’ sensitive data at all costs.
Managing Schema Changes
If there is any sudden change occurring in your data, we will handle it for you to ensure you won’t miss any important event. Our ETL tools restructure the underlying data schema for optimization purposes automatically.
Mapping of Integrations
We convert your data based on your needs, in the way that you want it to be, from any sources. Our ETL tools figure out the schema and enable the automatic mapping of integrations automatically. If you prefer to have full control over your data, we can customize these tools for you.
Talk to one of our experts today, we offer more than just an IT solution!
