Tag: data warehousing
Data Lake vs Data Warehouse
A data lake is a location where new data can enter without any hurdles. Since any kind of data can reside in a data lake, it is a great source to unearth new ideas and experiment with data. However, due to this openness, it suffers from a lack of meaningful structure. The larger business audience may find that the data lake is a mess. This is where the scalability traits of the data warehouse gain significance. In data warehousing, we try to match dimensions and measures into queryable components that are consistent. This makes it easier for an ever-scalable audience to consume this data.
Let us now take a deep dive and compare the properties of a data lake and a data warehouse.
Read more: How Data Warehousing Adds Value To Data Visualization & Reporting
7 key differences between data lake and data warehouse
1. Type of Operation:
- A data warehouse is used for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). This includes running reports, aggregating queries, performing analysis, and creating models such as the OLAP model based on whatever you want to do. These operations are carried out typically after your transactions are done. For example, you want to check all the transactions done by a particular client. Since the data is stored in a denormalized format, you can easily fetch the data from a single table and showcase the required report.
- A data lake is used typically to perform raw data analysis. All the raw data i.e XML files, images, pdf, etc. are just gathered for further analysis. While capturing data, you don’t have to define the schema. You may not know how this data can be used in the future. You are free to perform different types of analytics to uncover valuable insights.
2. Cost of storing data:
- In data warehouses, the cost of data storage is high. This is because the software used by these data warehouses are expensive. Additionally, the cost of maintenance is also high since it consists of power, cooling, space, and telecommunications. Another point to consider is that since a data warehouse contains large amounts of data in a denormalized format, it tends to take up a lot of disk space.
- Contrarily, in data lakes the cost of data storage is low. They use open-source software which costs less. Also since the data is unstructured, data lakes can scale to high volumes of data at low cost.
3. Schema:
- Data warehouses use schema-on-write. Before storing the data, it has to be transformed and provided for application in analytics and reporting. You need to know for what purpose you’ll be using the data prior to importing it into the data warehouse. As new requirements arise, you may have to reevaluate the models that were defined earlier.
- On the other hand, data lakes employ schema-on-read. Without the necessity of a single schema, users can store any kind of data in the data lake. They can discover the schema later while reading the data. This means different teams can store their data in the same place without relying on the IT departments to write ETL jobs and query the data.
4. Data Quality:
- A data warehouse contains high-quality data. As the data undergoes extreme curation before storage, it can be considered as the central version of the truth.
- A data lake contains raw data that may or may not be curated.
Read more: Data Visualization vs. Data Analytics – What’s the Difference?
5. Users:
- Typically business professionals who deal with reporting use data warehouses. Again, since the operation costs of a data warehouse tend to be higher, large and established organizations that deal with tons of data opt for it.
- Data scientists and analysts generally use data lakes. With raw data the possibilities are endless. They can perform various types of analytics to glean insights and identify patterns to convert the data at hand into valuable information.
6. Security:
- Data warehouses tend to store extremely sensitive data for reporting purposes. These could be compensation data, credit card information, healthcare data, and so on. The data security for data warehouses is mature and robust since this technology has been around for quite a while now. Only authorized personnel can access the data warehouse.
- Data Lake is a relatively new technology and hence data security is still evolving. As mentioned, a data lake is created using open source technologies. Therefore its data security is not as great as that of a data warehouse.
7. Technology:
- Data warehouse applications use relational database technologies. This is because relational database technologies support quick queries against structured data.
- The Hadoop ecosystem is well-aligned to the data lake approach because of its agility. It can easily scale to large volumes and can handle any structure of data.
Read more: Power BI or Tableau: Which is the better choice for your business
How both data lake and data warehouse can go hand in hand
Both data lake and data warehouse are the principal constituents of modern data architecture. A data lake usually serves as the starting point from where organization-wide data is onboarded. It is also the stage at which the data warehouse structures its data. An organization that incorporates both data lake and data warehouse will exhibit the traits of entrepreneurship and diligence, which means the organization will be both open-minded and scalable.
The BI industry has tools that cater to highly unstructured data lakes that enable open-minded discovery. Also, there are tools that are designed to scale as a structured information delivery platform concurrently with your data warehouse. Though these tools oppose one another, they have very little in common. They are purpose-built according to the needs of an organization. So before choosing a tool you need to determine which one would be right for your needs and help your organization grow. Contact us now for more information!
Can Data Warehousing Enhance the Value of Data Visualization & Reporting?
Organizations rely heavily on data to make crucial business decisions. Hence, it is important for your business to have access to relevant data. That is where a well-designed data warehousing comes to your rescue!
Besides gaining actionable insights, corporate executives, business managers, and other end-users make more informed business decisions based on historical data.
Today’s Analytics and Business Intelligence solutions provide the ability to:
- Optimize business processes within your organization
- Increase your operational efficiency
- Identify market trends
- Drive new revenues
- Forecast future probabilities and trends
Before understanding how data warehousing can add more value to data visualization and reporting, let’s take a look at what these terms mean.
Analytics and Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is a process that includes the tools and technologies to convert data from operational systems into a meaningful and useful format. This helps organizations analyze and develop meaningful insights to take timely business decisions. The information derived from these tools demonstrate the root cause of your business problems and allow decision-makers to strategize their plans based on the analysis.
Business Intelligence is information not just derived from a single place, but multiple locations and sources. It can be a combination of the external data derived from the market and the financial and operational data of an organization that is meaningfully applied to create the “intelligence”.
Data Warehouse
Data warehouse is a repository that collects data from various data sources of an organization and arranges it into a structured format. An ideal data warehouse set up will extract, organize, and aggregate data for efficient comparison and analysis. Data warehouse supports organizations in reporting and data analysis by analyzing their current and historical data. This makes it a core component of Business Intelligence.
Unlike a database, that stores data within, at a fully normalized or third normal form (3NF), a data warehouse keeps the data in a denormalized form. It means that data is converted to 2NF from 3NF and hence, is called Big Data.
Key benefits of a Data Warehouse
- Combine data from heterogeneous systems
- Optimized for decision support applications
- Storage of historical and current data
Why We Need Data Warehouse for Business Intelligence?
Before the business intelligence approach came into use, companies used to analyze their business operations using decision support applications connected to their Online Transaction Systems (OLTP). Queries or reports were retrieved directly from these systems.
However, this approach was not ideal due to:
- Quality issues
- Reports and queries were affecting business transaction performance
- Data resides in heterogeneous sources
- Non-availability of historical data
- Non-availability of data in the exact form required for reporting
Connecting your organization’s business intelligence tools to a data warehouse can provide you benefits in terms of production, transportation, and sale of products.
Data Visualization vs. Data Analytics – What’s the Difference?
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Using AWS
Today, traditional BI has given way to agile BI where agile software development accelerates business intelligence for faster results and more adaptability. Big Data is growing fast to provide useful insights for making improved business decisions.
There has been a paradigm shift in data storage with warehousing solutions moving increasingly to the cloud. Amazon Redshift, for instance, is one of the most popular cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Redshift is a fully-managed analytical data warehouse on cloud, that can handle petabyte-scale data, which enables analysts to process queries in seconds.
Redshift offers several advantages over traditional data warehouses. It provides high scalability using Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to set-up and for maintenance, without the need for upfront payments. You can either add nodes to a Redshift cluster or create additional Redshift clusters to support your scalability needs.
You can use AWS Marketplace ISV Solutions for Data Visualization, Reporting, and Analysis.
Data visualization helps you identify areas that need attention or improvement, clarify factors that influence business such as customer behavior, and making decisions such as finding out a suitable market for your product or predicting your sales volumes, and much more.
TIBCO Jaspersoft, for example, is a solution that delivers embedded BI, production reporting, and self-service reporting for your Amazon data at affordable rates. It features the ability to auto-detect and quickly connect to Amazon RDS and Amazon Redshift. Jaspersoft is available in the AWS Marketplace in both single-tenant and multi-tenant versions. TIBCO Jaspersoft for AWS includes the ability to launch in a high availability cluster (HA) as well as with Amazon RDS as a fault-tolerant repository. Pricing is based on the Amazon EC2 instance, type as well as the chosen single or multi-tenant mode.
Image source: http://bit.ly/2IWWCDn
Summary
By moving your analytics and business intelligence to a hybrid cloud architecture you will be able to handle huge amounts of data and scale at the rate of expansion required by your business. You will also be able to deliver information and solutions at the speed that your employees and customers demand, and gain insights that will enable your organization to innovate faster than ever.
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing are two important aspects of the survival of any business. These technologies give accurate, comprehensive, integrated, and up-to-date information on the current enterprise scenario which allows you to take the required steps and make crucial decisions for your company’s growth. To know how your business can benefit from the latest technologies, get in touch with our custom software development experts today!