DatatWare Housing

Data warehousing in many ways has become an industry buzzword that seems to promise much and deliver little. A good part of this is due to the often lofty and nebulous benefits that data warehousing vendors tout. What most businesses really want to understand is can data warehousing help them and if so, in what concrete way.

Offload Resource Intensive Processing
One of the ways that data warehousing can help your business is by offloading the resource intensive processes of generating reports onto database systems that are not also responsible for real time transaction processing. I have seen many web applications completely bogged down by the management reports being generated by users. Often companies solve this by throwing bigger and more expensive hardware at the database when offloading the reporting functions would allow them to gain more benefit for less cost. This also makes it possible for users to write ad hoc reporting queries without the concern that they might bring the transaction processing system down from a poorly written query.

Preserve Historical Data
Data warehousing allows reporting systems to analyze and report on a larger volume of historical data. Most transaction processing systems periodically purge transaction data to save space and maintain performance. Moving this data into a data warehouse allows your business to generate reports over a larger period than what may be saved in the transaction processing systems. This allows you to spot trends over a longer period or analyze the state of various transactions at a point in time.

Merge External Data
This ability to analyze longer time periods to spot trends makes data warehousing particularly helpful to marketing departments. In fact, its most immediate benefits are actually realized by those responsible for marketing. Another way data warehousing makes this possible is by allowing for the merging of data from external data sources for analysis. You would not want to merge this external data in your transaction processing system but in a data warehouse, external data may provide better intelligence about your customers. For example, you might use purchased mailing lists to find which of your customers recently obtained new mortgages. If you marketed products that were of interest to new home owners, this would be a highly useful metric.

Restrict Data Access
Another way that data warehousing can help your business is by segregating roles and permissions in a more concrete way. You may have employees that should have access to data for reporting purposes but perhaps they should not have permissions or access to the transaction processing system. A data warehouse makes it easy to separate those users that only need reporting access versus those that have access to "real time" transaction data.

Data warehousing is one of those technologies that is often poorly communicated. In a concrete way, data warehousing can help a business by providing better marketing intelligence and by segregating the data for reporting from the data used for real time transaction processing. This is a strong benefit and one that is simple to understand. Why data warehouse vendors could not just say so, I will never understand