Art of BI: Data Warehouse vs. Data Hub

The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) remains one of the most important tools of any organization, as detailed in my recent white paper, When the Data Doesn’t Match Up – How to Get Business Insights You can Trust. To build further on this idea, let’s talk about the important companion to the EDW – the Enterprise Data Hub (EDH), a tool Datavail recommends building once your data warehouse has been properly built and customized to the needs of your business. An EDH is an ideal companion to an EDW because, in addition to its storage and processing benefits, it helps alleviate some of the primary challenges that face an EDW. But how is an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) different from an Enterprise Data Hub (EDH)?

When deployed alongside common EDW infrastructure, an EDH helps streamline data integration processing by offloading data transformations and improving performance, thus reducing costs. An EDH has following capabilities:

Flexibility

Although flexibility is a key benefit to any business, traditional EDW lacks flexibility due to the difficulty in adding new data sources. But this is not the case with the modern EDH, which can connect multiple databases, data warehouses, and other systems. This is achieved on the fly, as quickly as the data can be captured, integrating the diverse data types from multiple sources to reveal relationships.

Up-to date data

In the world of data warehousing, speed, cost, and value are of paramount importance. With traditional EDW, data can be out of date by days, weeks or even months, which may affect the day-to-day Business Intelligence (BI) processes. A modern data hub overcomes this problem by presenting fresh data that is readily available for analysis as soon as it is captured. It responds to queries in near real time, and one can immediately start getting analytic value from it.

Ability to handle complex queries

In traditional EDW, we are typically limited by how our data architect operates in terms of what source of query one can ask and how flexible it is. However, a modern data hub offers a rich set of tools for processing and analyzing data. It is able to directly query semi-structured data on large volumes of unknown value, including JSON, CSE, XML, and essentially anything you can scan into these modern data sources.

Rapid deployment and cost savings

EDH can be deployed in a matter of days or weeks in contrast to the traditional EDW that may take days, weeks, months, and even years to deploy a sole system.Being able to connect directly to the data has made it much simpler to implement and run EDH at a very low cost. It has also made it cost-effective to run data-driven experiments and analysis over unlimited data.

To learn more about data hubs please contact Datavail today. Datavail is a company of over 1,000 professionals helping clients build and manage applications and data via a world-class tech-enabled delivery platform and software solutions across all leading technologies.