Data Warehousing

The design of a database schema to support transactional workloads is very different to that required to support reporting and analysis. This is why running business intelligence tools directly against business systems almost always yields poor performance, with the added disadvantage that the additional workload will certainly have an adverse impact on the original application’s performance.

The organisation, and even the format, of data within a business system is not designed for business intelligence use and it is often necessary to transform it and to combine it with data from a variety of sources in order to answer specific questions in a report or piece of analysis.

In addition to this, the database management system technology can be optimised for transactional or business intelligence applications but not both at the same time. This has led to the development of a number of specialist database engines designed to deliver the best performance under reporting and analysis workloads.

A data warehouse is a database separate from your transactional business systems into which data can be reorganised to make it optimal for business intelligence and analysis purposes and/or for long term storage. Data is extracted from your business systems, transformed as required, and loaded into a database schema designed for this purpose, either using a traditional database technology or a one designed specifically for this purpose.

SDG Group regularly designs and builds data warehouses for customers using either conventional relational database software or specialised database technologies such as RedShift and Actian Vector, on-premise or in the Cloud.

Alongside these we can create the appropriate data transformation and loading mechanisms employing a variety of tools.