A data warehouse is a database that records structured data for further processing. The most common areas of application for the data are reporting, business intelligence, and analytics. A data warehouse aims to provide high-quality data as easily as possible in order to simplify subsequent analysis steps. In this article, we go into more detail about the roles and uses of data warehouses in everyday life.
What Roles Are Involved In A Data Warehouse?
The idea of a data warehouse is based on the use of data beyond operational purposes. As a result, many people should deal with a data warehouse or its use:
BI Expert
The heart of a data warehouse is one or more business intelligence experts. You know the structure, documentation, and application of the warehouse and organize the connection of new data sources. They are often directly responsible for creating reports and the like.
Domain Expert
While BI experts represent a transverse function, the added value of a data warehouse in the domain, for example, sales, marketing, or logistics. Domain experts are therefore responsible for connecting the correct data and generating the correct evaluations.
Database Administration
If you bet on an SQL database, you need technical support from IT.
Data Analysts
In addition to the general BI expert, there are often also responsible data analysts in the domain or a central unit who take care of the evaluation of the data. It is important to combine domain knowledge with data expertise in order to generate actionable insights, if possible.
Controlling
One of the most common origins of business intelligence is a company’s controlling department. Therefore, they are often closely involved in a data warehouse.
Visualization Experts
If a company is very knowledgeable in the use of data and dashboards, the visualization itself – i.e., the creation of the dashboard- may even be outsourced to experts.
Data Scientists
Another type of consumer of data from the data warehouse is data scientists. If the data is available in a very high resolution, data mining can be used, and new knowledge can be worked out.
Cloud Solution Engineers
If you rely on a cloud solution, it has to be built up and maintained. Whether a cloud solution engineer, or data engineer, or a data architect. A very valuable role to ensure data flows and keep the infrastructure running.
Where Are Data Warehouse Applications Used?
With the development of databases and the digital storage of data, the first step was to establish connections between this data. The flood of data is getting bigger. More and more data is being collected. In order to be able to evaluate these data masses in a targeted manner, they must be related to each other.
Data warehouses develop their great strength here. Without data warehouses, an overall analysis would not be possible, and the evaluations would be limited to individual databases.
A data warehouse integrates the data from different sources and provides logical connections between all this data. To do this, the data does not necessarily have to leave its source location. They can also be available as a linked data connection in the data warehouse.
The areas of application for data warehouses are diverse. No matter in which area the application takes place, it has always been so far hidden connections found, such as data mining. Reports, statistics, and key figure assessments are quickly available and flexibly adaptable. Nothing stands in the way of a transparent and comprehensive presentation of complex relationships.
In short, the data warehouse provides all related information transparently and represents.
Medical Use
Data warehouses enable personalized medicine. For example, with the help of gene sequencing algorithms on the genetic material used by blood samples. This can create a medicine based on the genetic, individual virus strain of the data subject.
In addition, the risk of heart attack or genetic defects and the resulting diseases can be determined more easily. The data warehouse establishes connections between the patient record, the image material from radiology, and the laboratory results.
Manufacturing
First, data warehouses allow us to measure the image of companies and products in fine detail and depth, as was simply not possible before. Representative market images are generated inexpensively using sentiment analysis on social media. In this way, it is determined which product trends arise or are sustainable. Companies can react quickly and flexibly.
Airlines
Also, airlines benefit from data warehouses by linking data. So can down downtimes and waiting times can be assessed much better. Delays are minimized. Unprofitable routes can be easily found through the analysis and can be deleted. The jet fuel consumption based on route, aircraft type, and payload can be optimized based on the data from the data warehouse.
Energy Industry
Energy suppliers increasingly rely on data warehouse solutions. Consumption recording and billing provide data in the data warehouse. In this way, targeted analyses can be created according to categorized target groups. Even the evaluation of consumption data in different regions, by age group, gender, or household type, is possible.
Education
Store and analyze information about faculty and students. Maintain student portals to facilitate student activities. Extract information for research grants and assess student demographics. Integrate information from different sources into a single repository for analysis and strategic decision-making.
As exhibited, a data warehouse ensures improvement in the decision-making process of a business and increases organizational performance. Want to learn more about it? Let’s see how our Data Warehouse Consulting Experts can make it work right for you!
