BI Stage 3: The Data Warehouse

A data warehouse is a repository of all or significant parts of data that an enterprise's various business systems collect. It aims to capture business data from diverse sources for useful analysis and access by business users.

Traditional Method:

Using conventional tools, the design and creation of a data warehouse is mainly a manual process. The dimensional model and database schema for a data warehouse has to specified and created manually based on an understanding of the business requirements. Traditionally, companies are forced to choose between two sub-optimal approaches:

Multiple data marts and warehouses fed by multiple ETL processes, limiting the scope of any one application OR
One Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) that provides scale but severely limits the flexibility of delivering new analytical applications.

Integrated SaaS method:

Data Warehouses are created automatically on the fly for each business intelligence project/application. No reliance on a single EDW approach.

Continue to Stage 4: Analytic Engine

Stage 3: The Data Warehouse(s)