Does your company deal with a lot of transactions every day? Do you have years of historical data in the multiple sources you would like to analyse to predict trends, improve decision-making, and satisfy customers? If yes, great! Then you will require a Datawarehouse. But which one, on-prem or cloud Datawarehouse?
What is Datawarehouse?
A data warehouse is a large central data repository that is used to store voluminous heterogeneous data. It holds data from multiple sources to feed BI, reporting, and analytics. The data you store in the data warehouse can be used for data analysis and reporting.
The primary purpose of the data warehouse is to enable users to consolidate multiple data sources and analyse all of their data to make data-driven decisions.
Why should you get a Data Warehouse?
A successful data warehouse can help you in many ways. It provides:
Consistency
Data warehousing is transforming data from multiple sources and formats into a single standard format, making it easier for users to analyse, report, and share insights on the complete data. The more you have consistent data within your company, the better it can be used by every team member for querying, analysing, and reporting.
Centrality
Centrality is another good reason to migrate to a data warehouse. Most companies need to consolidate data from multiple sources built on different platforms to execute insightful information. Data warehouses address this issue by consolidating data into a single repository making all the company's data available from a single place.
Accessibility
Every employee can make an informed data decision thanks to accessibility. Because all data is stored in a single location, every employee can easily access any data across the organisation. As a result, it removes the impediment to fully utilising the data in the database.
How is a Datawarehouse Architected?
A Datawarehouse architecture is made of 3 tiers:
Top tier
The front-end client is a top tier that displays results via reporting, analysis, and data mining tools.
Middle tier
The analytic engine which is used to access and analyse the data is a middle tier.
Bottom tier
The database server is a bottom tier, where data is loaded and stored. Data is stored in the bottom tier in two ways-
- Frequently access data is stored in very fast storage such as SSD drivers.
- Infrequently access data is stored in a low-cost object store, such as Amazon S3
What is an On-prem Datawarehouse?
On-prem runs on your local network, which means a high initial investment in hardware and software licenses, and you need the right skills and employees to run and manage it.
What is a Cloud Datawarehouse?
A cloud data warehouse is a service that integrate, store, organize and manage the data that is used by companies for different activities such as analysing, querying, and monitoring.
On-Premises Datawarehouse vs. Cloud Datawarehouse
Scalability
Cloud data warehouses can handle the growing workload. You can increase or decrease the scale as per your business needs. On-premises data warehouses are scalable, but they come with a cost. Whenever extra storage and processing are needed, you need to expand hardware and scaling perimeters.
Availability
Companies like Amazon and Microsoft have highly invested in this area. As a result, they guarantee 99.99% uptime. But, of course, it depends on the quality of available software, hardware, and the competence of the in-house team.
Security
Security is often cited as a concern when migrating to a cloud data warehouse. Cloud companies ensure that the data you migrate to the cloud data warehouse will remain encrypted and secured. On-premises data warehouses are the most secure option when a rigid data policy is supported.
Deployment
On-premise data warehouse is deployed locally or only on the company's proprietary systems and servers. On the other hand, cloud data warehouse can be either hosted on public or private cloud.
Performance
A Cloud data warehouse is a perfect choice when performance is your focus area. It is well suited for multiple data sources, queries can be measured in seconds, and the on-premises data warehouse only shows excellent query performance when the scalability challenge gets resolved.
Cost-effectiveness
There is no physical server to acquire or set up with a cloud data warehouse. Instead, providers take care of hardware, upgrades and management. Users pay for the storage and processing time they require. Providers follow pay-as-you-go pricing technique that gives flexibility to users to pay for what they use as they need or can afford. An on-prem data warehouse is more expensive than a cloud data warehouse because it requires a team, hardware, and expertise.
The best Cloud Datawarehouse options
Datawarehouse solutions offer a variety of valuable storage, data management, and consolidation features, such as the ability to store data from multiple data sources, transform data, remove duplication, and improve consistency for analytics. In addition, choosing a cloud data warehouse will give you even more flexibility. But what are the best cloud data warehouse options, and how can they help your company?
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a simple, cost-effective, and petabyte-scale data warehouse platform that allows you to analyze all of your data and run complex queries using a query optimization technique.
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery is a fully-managed and highly-scalable data warehouse that allows anyone to analyze petabytes of data with built-in features like machine learning, business intelligence, and geospatial analysis.
Snowflake
Snowflake is one of the best cloud data warehouse products that provide simplicity without sacrificing features. It automatically scales up and down to balance performance and cost.
SAP Datawarehouse Cloud
SAP Datawarehouse Cloud is a modern data warehousing solution that securely connects data across on-premise and multi-cloud repositories in real-time. The no-code environment on SAP Datawarehouse Cloud makes it easy for users to connect, model, and visualize data from multiple data sources (on-prem &cloud) into one pre-integrated SAP solution.
Deciding between On-premises or Cloud Datawarehouse
Many companies choose cloud data warehouses over on-prem because of the several benefits such as cost-effectiveness, ease of setup, no-code power, accessibility, scalability, and performance. In addition, since it doesn't require maintenance and management, you can give most of your time to essential tasks like analyzing and querying data.
Streamline your Datawarehouse migration journey with Boltic
To scale up the data infrastructure you need a centralized repository that allows you to store multiple data sources and gives you the ability to analyze, and report the data. When it comes to migration of the data, many companies opt for a traditional approach , which is a long-drawn-out, glitchy and requires tech understanding.
Boltic makes easy migration by allowing you to extract data from the popular databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB) to a cloud data warehouse (Google BigQuery), transform the data along the way without writing any code.
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