Data management - making quick and well-founded decisions

A data warehouse is designed to structure data and prepare the various formats. One of its main advantages is that it standardises data, which saves a great deal of time. Data warehousing makes it possible not just to bundle the data in a central system, but also to combine it as you wish, thus providing a consistent view of data from different sources. Thanks to this holistic approach, relationships can be recognised much more easily, meaning that management decisions can be reached in a well-founded and targeted way.

Data warehousing offers the outstanding advantage that companies are able to analyse large amounts of data from different source systems and gain significant analytical value from it, as well as record historical data.

Computer scientist William Inmon, who is seen as the father of data warehousing, describes the following four characteristics of data warehousing as distinctive advantages:

• Subject-oriented: Relevant data can be prepared for a specific subject or for an expert / functional area (e.g. sales).
• Integrated: Data warehouses can provide a consistent view of data from different sources.

• Permanent: In a data warehouse, all data is stored in a stable and long-term way.
• Time-dependent: Data warehouse analysis examines change over time.

A data warehouse delivers high data throughput and gives users enough flexibility to disaggregate the data so that they can analyse it from different angles.

A data warehouse serves as the basis for a customised BI environment that provides reports, dashboards and other interfaces.Company decision-makers can access all relevant data much faster with a data warehouse solution and generate solid forecasts and trends.