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The Key to Lean Data Warehouses

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Written by Daniel Woods

Data warehouses are a one stop shop for all of an organization’s data. It usually combines multiple data sources, performs data manipulations and data cleanup, and presents the data in such a manner which allows fast data retrieval. The organization can then grab a business intelligence tool to develop insights into the organization which would not be possible with disparate data sources. Before you can get to reporting, though, the data must be extracted, cleaned, transformed, and then loaded into the warehouse. This process can take months to complete, and the upfront investments are beyond what most organizations can tolerate.

simplicity 300x201 The Key to Lean Data Warehouses

Applying lean principles would be a tremendous benefit in this kind of data infrastructure. Getting the data to the end users as quickly as possible to start the feedback loop helps identify data quality problems or areas where additional business rules may need to be applied. In a virtual database, the schema that reports will use can be defined on the fly, even when that virtual schema spans multiple data sources. Joining and transformation can happen in that virtual layer, and without the point to point integration usually required for a data warehouse the joins and transformations can be managed. Sitting business intelligence or reporting tools on top of a virtual database allows users to gain access not only to traditional data sources like MS SQL, Oracle and MySQL. It also permits interrogation of unstructured, cloud based and noSQL data sources like Salesforce, MongoDB, Google Docs or Google Analytics. Data verification and report building can then take place at the organizations request, and iteratively without a large upfront investment providing value in weeks instead of months.

After using virtualization to rapidly build out the desired reports, a good virtualization technology will allow you to go back and build the warehouse using your existing work. Applications like Pentaho’s Data Integration, which use JDBC drivers to connect to data sources, can connect to the virtual database through a JDBC driver to access the same tables we used in the reports. You can write SQL against it to pull the data and load into your warehouse.

Combining a reporting solution with a data service enabled through virtualization allows you to quickly dive into your data, identify possible issues, and start building out your reports while in parallel start structuring your data warehouse. This will allow you to shed time off on the creation of your data warehouse while also providing business value from the start.

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