What kind of data gets stored in data warehouses? [closed]

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Looking at services like Amazon Redshift, which is meant for storing petabytes of data. What forms of data are meant to be stored here? Logs, raw data?

Answer 1

The question for a data warehouse is not what kind of information you store in it but rather how you store it and what you inted to use it for. Any data an organisation needs to analyze and compare may be put into the data warehouse.

To define a data warehouse is very difficult and you'll probably get as many definitions as people you ask. I've seen lots of different implementations and no one can really say that this is a data warehouse and this is not. However there are a number of key points that a data warehouse normally should fulfill, namely that it should be time variant (i.e. store datapoints over time) and it should be non-volatile (i.e. you never update data in a data warehouse, you only insert).

Following these rules allow you to the most common data warehouse analysis, namely analyze data over time, e.g. compare this seasons sales with last season.

I'm not sure what Amazon Redshift actually do, but if it is a data warehouse or not I think is more a question of how you use it.

Answer 2

from what I understand the Amazon Redshift is a Service NOT a TECHNOLOGY. The service is meant to handle ALL of your data warehousing needs towards keeping a minimised Capital expenditure (CAPEX).

Effectively you can use it as the corporate Data Warehousing solution (store ANY DATA you would have paid money to store and analyse: be it Logs, Raw Unstructured Data, Structured Data - literally ANY DATA); this is what Amazon is aiming at. It is intended to save you the costs of infrastructure, software, setup and even people costs, therefore it's nature as a Service. Having worked in the Data industry for 20 years I can see the advantage being offered.

I have also noticed that Amazon is even offering a certification program which should simplify the selection of people who you have to hire to service this solution when you are ready to venture into it.

See this very simple video here - it sounds too good to be true. But I would advice you to get a certified or very experienced with Amazon Cloud Infrastructure deployments, see some partners here, so you get the true ins and outs. I am sure they will offer you free consultation as part of their pre-sales work.

All the best! Leslie