In a digital world such in today’s world, organisations need to access information to make better decisions in a fast and agile way to be competitive and to survive. That leads companies to search for alternative solutions to modernise the way they build their data warehousing systems, such as data warehouse automation tools.
Is widely accepted that a data warehouse is a critical component to a data-driven enterprise and it becomes part of the organisation’s information systems strategy, with a significant impact in the business.
However, after 25 years of building data warehouses, is still a painful endeavour, they are too time-consuming, too expensive and they are too hard to change after deployment. There are many activities around building a Data Warehouse that makes this process labour intensive and time-consuming, such as, requirements gathering and analysis, source data analysis, source-target mapping, data transformation logic, Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes, data analysis, design and Load. On the other hand, building a Data Warehouse is not easy, it requires integrating several pieces of information that normally are in different systems which can be in different formats and volumes, across the organisation.
Data Warehouse Automation appears with the promise to address the limitations of traditional approaches, turning the data warehouse development from a prolonged effort into an agile one, with gains in efficiency and effectiveness in data warehousing processes. It provides an integrated development environment that eliminates much of the manual effort to design, develop, deploy, and operate a data warehouse.
Data Warehouse Automation tools enable collaboration between developers and business users around designs and iteratively creates data warehouses components such as data marts. Is a way to develop data warehouses faster, to have documentation always updated, to have standardised code, and to respond to business changes quickly.
So, is Data Warehouse Automation a Trick or Treat?
Data Warehouse Automation it’s definitely a Treat and not a Trick and a solution to consider when modernize data warehouse architectures as a way to achieve results faster, keeping costs controlled and reduce risk.
by Paula de Oliveira
Passio Consulting co-founder and Managing Partner