Companies generate a great deal of data during their business activities. In its raw state, this data is of little use but, if processed and interpreted correctly, it provides the information that enables the company’s leaders to make the most important strategic decisions for the competitive consolidation of the business.
Data Warehouse provides the solution to this need. It is a centralised “warehouse” in which data from multiple source systems, including traditional ERPs, converge over time.
What is a Data Warehouse?
It is a data management system designed to support Business Intelligence activities and therefore facilitate decision-making processes in the company.
It allows you to execute queries, i.e., interrogations of the DWH to obtain the relevant information, and perform data mining operations, in order to get valuable insights that facilitate the understanding of business performance.
Data Warehouse Architecture
We could structure the Data Warehouse concept in 3 components:
- Data Acquisition and Integration
- Data Transformation and Manipulation
- Data Organization
As we mentioned earlier, the source systems for data acquisition can be many:
- Internal systems: from Databases, ERP systems to Flat Files.
- External systems: applications and systems from external suppliers, websites/Internet, social media, cloud services.
The first step is the ETL process (extraction, transformation, and loading) with which we extract data from the source systems, and, with the help of various technical tools, we transform them so that they are centralised and standardised. Once the data are organised within the Data Warehouse, we have the possibility to manipulate them through the so-called Data Mart, that is a “container” of data, with which we create what is known in literature as “Star Schema”, i.e. the connection of the fact table, containing indicators and key fields, with the dimension tables, consisting of attributes, whose task is to qualitatively describe the content of the “facts”.
Only at this point, through specific front-end tools, can we represent and analyse this data in dashboards and KPIs, to provide decision makers with all the information they need to guide internal decision-making processes.
What does SAP offer?
There are many data warehouses on the market, and SAP offers several Business Intelligence solutions.
One of the most advanced proposals is a cloud solution: SAP HANA CLOUD.
It is a very “light” solution, both in terms of costs and maintenance, but above all it has led to an important change in data management in the company: the transition from the physical replication of data to its virtualisation on the cloud world.
Is data safe on the cloud?
The cloud is about using a space owned by an external provider. Its adoption can therefore generate mistrust at first impression.
This space is not always and only intended as a container that allows you to get more storage capacity outside your company. It can also be used to perform operations and calculations that require large computational resources not easily replicable internally, but available on the cloud. These operations are performed by accessing the data directly, avoiding their physical replication externally. The data thus remains within the company, providing the security desired by the customer.
In addition, virtualisation in cloud ensures real-time access to data, with high performance in terms of speed.
