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Enterprise Data Management

Beginner's Guide to Cloud Data Warehouse

Dr. Jagreet Kaur Gill | 01 May 2023

Beginner's Guide to Cloud Data Warehouse

Introduction

With the Ultimate increase in modern-day cloud infrastructure, many databases, Marketing applications, and ERPs have moved to the cloud. Thus, almost all business-critical data is now in the cloud. Thus, companies need a data warehouse that seamlessly stores the data from all the cloud-based applications. Thus this is where the Cloud Data Warehouse comes into the picture.

Robust Solutions are required for managing and analyzing large quantities of data across organizations and data-driven companies.

What is a Cloud Data Warehouse?

A cloud data warehouse is a kind of repository that can store the current and historical information collected over time. It is designed in such a way that it can give a long-range view of data over time, thus making it a core component of business intelligence. It is a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that allows SQL-like similar queries to be run on the information it contains.

A cloud data warehouse delivers swiftness and agility, provides us the value in minutes rather than months, and can be easily scaled up or down as per the requirement.

The existing data warehouses need to be remodeled by moving to the cloud to continue being part of modern data systems and analytics.

xenonstack-cloud-data-warehouse-solutions
Snowflake is a pay-as-you-go service. It charged users on the per-second basis of computation or query processing. Click to explore more about it.

Why do you need a Cloud Data Warehouse for an organization?

In today's modernized world, many businesses and industries must analyze the data on a massive scale and in real time. There may be some service providers that use real-time and ongoing data to adjust the prices throughout the day dynamically. 

Insurance companies use real-time data to track policies, payroll, sales, etc. Thus all of this is possible with the help of Data Warehouses.

A cloud data warehouse caters to us with the following capabilities.

  • Data storage and management: The real-time data is stored in a file system hosted in the cloud (i.e., S3).
  • Automatic Upgrades of the version
  • Flexible Capacity: Data can be easily expanded or contracted.

Difference between Traditional Data Warehouse and Cloud Data Warehouse

A traditional Data Warehouse is a domestic or localized Data Warehouse installed or located at the organization. The organization or the companies need to purchase the required hardware, such as servers, etc., by themselves, and thus this requires human resources and time.

Besides this, the organization will require a separate staff to manage this traditional data warehouse; scaling this warehouse would also take time as you need to buy, ship, and install all the new hardware.

traditional-data-warehouse

As its name suggests, Cloud Data Warehouse is the Data Warehouse solution available on the cloud. The organization or the companies don't have to have their hardware, as well as don't have to worry about maintaining them.

3rd party Cloud Data Warehouse providers manage the scalability, maintenance, and hardware updates. Some of the most common ones are Google, Snowflake, etc. Organizations can easily integrate the warehouses with other platforms, such as SaaS and other Business Analytics tools, as the data is available on the cloud. 

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How to choose the right cloud data warehouse?

A centralized and properly configured data warehouse for any data-driven organization is significant. You need a centralized place for all your data to live in so that the organizational teams can access it.

Cloud data warehouses outshine by providing security, speed, and reliability and allow us to modernize the processes quickly and make accessing the data in real-time very easy for the organization.

When it comes to choosing the right cloud storage, it requires a lot of consideration and carefulness as switching from one cloud data warehouse to another can be quite a hectic and disruptive process as well as time-consuming. So make your decision wisely. 

You must have heard that the devil is in the details, which is undoubtedly true when choosing the right data warehouse implementation. Here is a list of some of the sheer points that you should consider before choosing a data warehouse:

  • Cost - Money is often a significant driver when considering a data warehouse.
  • Time - Time matters more than the cost, especially if you are looking for something for the startups as they have to move as quickly as possible.
  • Scalability - If you are looking for a warehouse for a fast-growing business, one of the main things you will want to find out is what's involved with scaling your warehouse.
  • The architecture includes checking for technology, isolation, security, and elasticity support.
  • Performance includes checking for storage optimization, indexing, data types, and queries.
  • Use Cases - The major use cases include reporting, analyst-created dashboards, Ad hoc analytics, and high-performance analytics.
    xenonstack-cloud-data-warehouse-solutions
    The modern data warehouse on the cloud provides more powerful computing capabilities and will deliver real-time cloud analytics using data from diverse data sources. Download to discover the best platform to build a Cloud Data Warehouse in 2023.

Use cases for a Cloud Data Warehouse

The data warehouse is ideal for storing and centralizing information about your organization and its customers, business process metrics, and products. Also, it has many uses in various mind-boggling ways. Some of them include:

  • Big Data Integration
  • Reporting
  • Analyzing large Data Streams
  • Natural language processing (NLP)
  • Auditing

We look at each one in detail below. 

  • Big Data Integration - A data warehouse can be a good option for extensive data integration if you cannot rely on other solutions. In the other solutions available, the problem is that they may not be accurate or comprehensive enough to integrate all of the data sources effectively, so a data warehouse can provide data consistently that can be trusted because multiple sources have already verified it.
  • Reporting - Data Warehousing is an excellent way of storing and reporting purposes. They are perfect for ad-hoc reporting. They help you to get the information very fast.
  • Analyzing large Data Streams - Data continuously generated from multiple sources is called a large stream. A data warehouse has the capability to show its overall statistics by grouping a large stream of data.
  • Natural language processing (NLP) - NLP is used for quick data analysis, and there are many opportunities for growth using this in support, sales, and marketing. To store vast amounts of data that could be structured or unstructured, that could be analyzed using NLP.
  • Auditing - Compliance and auditing both being heavy labor tasks. There's a need to check over the spreadsheets of data and much more, and the auditor itself must do all these things. Thus all this being a tedious task, data warehouses store electronic copies of the essential documents, reducing the risk of errors and saving time and money while maximizing the accuracy of the analysis.

Benefits of Cloud Data Warehousing

There are Five Major benefits of using Cloud Data Warehouse

  • Lower Costs
  • Improved Performance
  • More Data Storage
  • Improved Disaster Recovery
  • More Accessibility

cloud-data-warehouse-advantages

  • Lower Costs - Cost is the biggest reason most people are moving towards the cloud. Storing the data in our own data center on-premises is quite expensive; they require expensive hardware, consistent maintenance, and time-consuming updates. As the amount of data to be collected is increasing daily, data warehouses are becoming more pricey daily. In contrast, cloud data warehousing, it's on-demand, and while working with warehouses, you do not need to provide networking, server rooms, or any excess hardware.
  • Improved Performance - You must have heard that in Cloud Data Warehouses, more than one server shares the load, ensuring large amounts of data are processed without any delay.
  • More Data Storage - As mentioned earlier, Scaling Cloud Data up and down is easy with a pay-as-you-go model;
  • Improved Disaster Recovery - While working in large organizations, there's a need for "backup" data centers that have been prepped already with duplicate data for the sake of an emergency. Backup data centers require lots of physical assets, purchasing real estate in-house servers, etc., thus also increasing the cost to a great extent. All cloud data warehouses support asynchronous data duplication, thus not requiring any physical assets.
  • More Accessibility - Businesses are spreading these days across many countries, continents, etc. Thus remote work is becoming a big rage, and the modern world needs such a mechanism to access data regardless of location. Here comes the Cloud Data Warehouses can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Top Cloud Data Warehouse Providers

  • Snowflake - It is a SaaS( Software as a Service Platform); Snowflake enables organizations to allocate resources of different cloud vendors like AWS to the same database for querying and loading the data without impacting it warehouse performance.
  • Azure SQL Database- Azure SQL database is brilliant for data warehousing with up to 8 TB of data volumes and many active users.
  • Google BigQuery - Google BigQuery is very much cost-effective, and also it is exabyte-scale storage with tables up to 10,000 columns. It is effectively used when the analytical queries filter data according to clustering or partitioning.
  • Amazon Redshift It is a warehouse management product that is an essential part of the cloud computing platforms that are very large. SQL Querying of structured and unstructured data across the warehouse is also enabled using Amazon Redshift.

Conclusion

This article is an extensive overview of a Cloud Data Warehouse. The importance of a warehouse, as well as its immediate need, is also explained in this article. Also explained why there is a need to switch from Traditional Data Warehouse to Cloud Data Warehouses as the difference between them is discussed in detail. There is no need for hassle when there's an intelligent solution in today's modernized world.