Does our business win with data warehouse optimization?

Optimization issues, while initially a technical need, have a profound impact on business decision-making. Imagine the power of providing managers with real-time insights into the company's operations. This is the potential of data warehouse optimization, and it's a game-changer for our business.

The consumption of large amounts of data takes benefits from people specializing in this subject and covers the different phases to provide a high-quality service. Starting with the physical form in which the data is stored, reviewing the code techniques, and ending with the computing power that the different data platform providers can offer us. However, I do not want to explore this topic in depth because it is more technical. I want to take this opportunity to put the business and the strategy that we are implementing on the table.

From a business perspective, one of the main challenges is the value of time. In simple salary terms, how much does the time of a director or manager waiting to receive data cost? How much time of their workday is spent waiting, calling to see if the process has finished, and having access to what they need to start their real valuable task: analyzing the data, the results, making decisions, and implementing strategies? So, it makes sense to say that time is the most expensive resource within a data process.?

Every time we work on a data project, we should consider this starting point, and it doesn't matter if you have a data engineer, quality control, analyst, or architect role. Each data project ends up positively impacting the business, and if the company grows, all team members can grow.

If time is one of the most important factors, each technical decision must consider this, from the selection of the data ingestion tool to the data warehouse that we are going to use, as well as the tools to carry out our data cleaning, transformation, and enrichment processes and the tool to visualize the results.

When selecting a data ingestion tool, we must ask ourselves how much time it costs. Our priority should be a tool that speeds up data ingestion processes, allows for adequate monitoring, and does not require highly specialized personnel.

A data warehouse is not a general database or a transactional one. The warehouse approach allows for massive data ingestion and queries in reduced time, in seconds or minutes, but never hours. If our company has an excellent transactional database but does not yield the desired results in the analytics process, we may need a database focused on data warehouse workloads.

The body needs the heart, head, arms, legs, and other parts to work efficiently; our data strategy also needs several pieces. A data warehouse is the heart of our data products and strategy, so selecting the right one is crucial.

When processing our data, we must look for tools that can perform this task as close as possible to our data warehouse or, better yet, directly in the data warehouse to optimize processing time instead of considering data movement times. This is the basis of the new ELT paradigm, where the transformation is performed at the end, taking advantage of all the physical storage optimization features and computing power associated with the same data warehouses.

Finally, the most visible part is displaying data, results, patterns, findings, and a dashboard, allowing decision-makers to focus on strategy and business growth. This is one of the most fun parts. However, it requires a whole host of best practices regarding colors, ways of presenting data, chart types, and alignment, as you require more detail when exploring more specific topics.

At first glance, these seem like many complex pieces that will take a long time to produce results. However, proper selection and implementation guided by best practices in the data industry can give us very close to real-time results.

It will be a pleasure for the Pomerol consulting team to accompany you on your data days, share our experiences and knowledge at any stage of a data project, or assist you in completing one.

Victor Gomez, Principal Data Consultant at Pomerol Partners

[email protected]