Data has been named the currency of the future that outrivals the value of the likes of oil and gold in today’s insight-driven world. To maximize its utility and drive powerful business decisions, you have data warehouses that sit at the center of most organizations’ analytics strategy. Speed and accuracy of information are of the essence when you need to make game-changing decisions in the competitive landscape.
Since data warehouses have a lot of moving parts, it makes sense to have automated processes in place that enable IT teams to deliver actionable insights at the speed of business. And this is where the concept of data warehouse automation comes in.
Essentially, data warehouse automation is a mindset shift. Once adopted, it ensures a faster data-to-value journey, gives more room for innovation, and makes work more purpose-oriented and enjoyable for your IT team.
Data Warehouse Automation
As part of this series, it is a good idea to start with what data warehouse automation (DWA) tools, like Astera DW Builder, can offer and get you on board with the fact that this technology is extremely useful and can provide you with amazing results. Let’s get right into it.
Exploring the Wonders of Data Warehouse Automation
Benefits of Data Warehouse Automation
Build Better Quality Data Warehouses with Success
It is always a good idea to divide any big project into small, manageable cycles with fixed deliverables to incrementally reach your end goal. The main benefit of this approach is that you get to incorporate changes in requirements that occur during the project easily without having to roll back massively or go back to square one.
On average, traditional enterprise data warehouse projects take about 26-36 months to provide value to businesses. That’s a long duration. Not only that, you’d need a highly structured approach, a large business and development team, and involve various consultancy firms to increase the chances of its success. With data warehouse automation, you get the ability to work in shorter iterations, test and verify your data models and integration flows through rapid prototyping, ensure consistency with business requirements, and deliver a high-quality data warehouse.
If you look at it from a glass-half-empty perspective, data warehouse automation packs you with the ability to fail faster, learn quicker and get back up stronger and better.
Smaller Teams for the Win!
Data Warehouse Automation Comic (Credit: Dilbert)
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has a famous Two Pizza rule. It essentially says that if you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, then there are too many people.
While the rule is focused on team meetings, it can be applied to data warehousing too, as smaller teams have improved coordination, higher flexibility, lower number of hand-offs, and better communication. And with DWA, you can shave off the extra developers from the data warehouse team as it allows you to automate a majority of the repetitive manual tasks, like data modeling and ETL generation. It also reduces the lag or delay that naturally comes in understanding the work that the previous teams have done and lowers the overall process’s complexity.
That means you can assign those additional developers in the DW team to other value-adding tasks easily and save costs to hire more people. This is especially good news if your business has a limited budget.
Change Propagation is Easy and Super Fast
Change is constant. Your business needs to evolve with the market and consumer needs to stay competitive or at the very least, stay relevant to your target audience. You need the data warehouse to supply you with the insights that factor in internal and external changes to make the right business moves.
DWA tools help build data warehouses that have rich metadata to facilitate changes rapidly. So whether you have added a new source system, changed the way you used to store a particular field, or modified relationships and indexing options of few entities, all you need is to update your data model and redeploy it. You’ll see the change has been propagated to your data warehouse. It is that simple!
One Platform for Everything Data Warehousing
Astera Data Warehouse Builder
DWA tools like Astera DW Builder offers a complete package. You get capabilities like dimensional data modeling, ETL/ELT generation, data quality and transformation, metadata management, data manipulation, and data delivery, all through a single integrated platform.
What does this mean for technical users? A shorter learning curve, standardized code, better collaboration between teams, and faster project delivery.
What does this mean for a business? The reduced total cost of ownership, happy developers, and faster time-to-insight.
Say Hello to No-Code ETL/ELT
After data modeling, perhaps the most time-consuming part is writing ETL/ELT code for populating your data warehouse. DWA introduces developers to the zero-code nirvana, where they work at a logical level (design level) to create the integration flows. This means that IT teams no longer have to fight SQLs and can get the data from source systems to the destination warehouse in hours or days.
In addition, migrating to a cloud data warehouse, like Snowflake, Azure Synapse Analytics, or Amazon Redshift, is easy and fast. Astera DW Builder automatically converts and optimizes the code to work in the target platform, saving developers from rewriting the code all over again.
Make Data Consumers Happy
What do front-line managers and business analysts want: to have access to complete, accurate, and reliable information in a timely manner. DWA empowers IT teams to fulfill this desire by helping construct data warehouses and data marts faster, create customized reporting and analytics solutions quicker and make them available for data consumers sooner.
Another great aspect of platforms like Astera DW Builder is the highly intuitive, user-friendly interface powered by drag-and-drop functionality. With little hands-on training, business users can use the tool to create their own views of information and hop over the IT barrier, allowing them to get insights as and whenever they need.
So, Do You Need Data Warehouse Automation?
The answer should be a resounding yes!
In essence, it is hard to find reasons to say no to data warehouse automation. Consider this:
As the CEO of a company operating in a competitive landscape, what do you truly desire: you want your people to be more efficient and contribute to better organizational productivity. You want concrete insights to drive initiatives and want to lower the risk and cost implications. You want to experience lightning-fast time-to-market when it comes to your products and services. And of course, in the broader picture, you want an upward climbing ROI chart that puts a beaming smile on every shareholder’s face.
To achieve all of this, you need to be in control of your data, have access to it as quickly as possible, and know how to use it in the right way. And this is exactly what data warehouse automation does for you.
Want to see how you can speed up and simplify your data warehouse development tasks? Schedule a demo with our team today.
