If your organization has undertaken a project or an ongoing initiative to develop data warehouses or establish and manage data extraction, transformation and loading AKA ETL development within the organization, you may find it helpful to engage a data warehousing consulting expert, or an ETL consultant.
If your business is like most, you have a lot of different data repositories and your data is buried in best-of-breed, legacy systems, data warehouses, the cloud and many other data storage areas. Sometimes it seems like all these data sources are inaccessible and that your data is hiding from even your most gifted analysts and IT staff.
If your business has a handle on all of its data and can easily extract, transform, load (ETL) and manage that data, and easily access data from within data warehouses (DWH), then your organization is rare, indeed!
Every business faces the challenge of managing and using data in a way that is meaningful, accurate and easy for users. To meet objectives, plan strategies and analyze information, the average enterprise must juggle best-of-breed, legacy systems, and many other data repositories that sometimes seem to hide data from even the most gifted analysts and IT staff members.
I HATE disorganization. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing you have a particular item and searching everywhere to find it, only to come up empty. I have a friend, Jenny, who collects thimbles and she has everything catalogued! From the date of purchase to the locale where the thimble was made, the age of the piece and in which display cabinet that thimble resides. SO…if she wants to know how many thimbles she has from the U.K., she can get a count. If she wants to know which thimble is the oldest, she can find that information too! Jenny created her own little database to capture and manage this information.
Good, clear data is crucial to the success of every organization. No one can run a successful business without understanding what they are doing that is working, what needs to be changed, what their customers want, what their competitors are doing and how the market is changing. You’ve got a lot of data but you need to get to the heart of that data, make it clear, and understand what it is telling you. That’s where data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) and data warehousing comes in.
Making the most of your data can be difficult, especially with so many data repositories, data warehouses and other data storage locations. Whether you have a data warehouse or you are considering implementing a DWH, you need to think carefully about how to structure, organize and integrate data if you are to achieve your data management goals.
ETL, DWH…you have to be a technical wizard to understand and leverage these tools. Or do you? ETL (or extraction, transformation and loading) and DWH (data warehousing) CAN seem daunting. How does one get data from disparate data sources to integrate and work together to get a clear picture of data and use it for analysis?
