Building Efficient Data Warehouse Architecture

Data warehousing is akin to a time capsule that gathers treasures from internal databases and external sources. Unlike regular databases, it keeps historical data too. This allows business leaders to analyze trends over time, making decisions based on both the present and the past.

A recent study by Technavio suggests that the cloud data warehouse market is set to increase by $49.15 billion by 2028. Companies are giving significant weightage to data warehousing keeping this forecast in mind. Now is the right time to invest in a data warehouse to ensure your business doesn't lag.

If you're unsure how to proceed, read on to discover the best practices for building a data warehouse architecture that meets your needs.

What Is Data Warehouse Architecture?

In a nutshell, data warehouse architecture refers to the careful planning, designing, constructing, and managing of processes for using data to make intelligent decisions.

Data warehouse architecture creates a single source of information for data gathered from multiple sources. This data is transformed into information, which is further transformed into knowledge and then used for analytics.

Data warehouse architecture must support various stages of the data lifecycle, including data collection, integrity management, data reconciliation, storage, transfer, and continuous improvement.

Usually, data architecture is designed to meet the needs of a particular department. Different departments, such as sales and marketing, have unique modeling and analysis requirements.

Types of Architecture

The first step is understanding the different types of data warehouse models. You can choose from the following options:

1. Single tier: Basic architecture

This type of architecture is not very widely used but may fit the needs of certain small businesses. It minimizes the amount of data by building a compact dataset. It also helps eliminate data redundancies.

2. Two-tier: Architecture with a centralized repository

This architecture consists of an additional data staging layer that cleanses and formats the data you store in the data warehouse. The two tiers can be identified as follows:

• Data tier: This is the layer where data is stored after it has gone through the ETL process used to load data into the warehouse.
• Client tier: The stored data is used for generating insights and decision-making in this layer. You can adjust this layer based on analytics results that reveal the latest market trends.

The two-tier architecture carries a distinct disadvantage: It is unscalable and can support only a small number of users.

3. Three-tier: Architecture with centralized repository and OLAP server

Most organizations choose this type of architecture while implementing a data warehousing system. The three-tiered architecture is useful for large organizations.

It resolves issues faced by two-tiered architecture; however, it has certain disadvantages. The three-tiered architecture requires extensive storage space, as it also allocates storage for the reconciliation layer. This creates redundancy.

Layers of Data Warehouse Architecture

A typical data warehouse consists of four layers. Each of them has a specific role and comes with a set of capabilities.

Let's examine each of the four layers:

• Source layer: This layer consists of all the systems, known as systems of record (SOR), that feed data into the warehouse. Each SOR has a different data format and requires a suitable capture method.
• Staging layer: This is a landing area for data originating from sources. Using a staging area is considered a good practice to ensure raw data is not used. The data in this layer needs to be cleansed, standardized, and verified for impactful analytics.
• Warehouse layer: The data is permanently stored in this layer. This layer includes tables, views, schemas, and procedures required to access the data depending on the model. This data is organized, integrated, and non-volatile.
• Consumption layer: This layer, also known as the analytics layer, is where you model the data for advanced analysis.

Essential Questions for Data Warehousing Strategies

Implementing a data warehouse is often an organization's first step toward modernization in terms of data infrastructure. It helps the organization stay competitive by extracting value from data and providing better customer service.

Implementing the right data warehousing strategy allows your organization to reap all the benefits of a modern data warehouse. But how do you create one?

Here are some key questions to help you gain the right perspective. Your strategy should be in line with the answers to these questions:

• How much storage space is required for your warehouse? Do you have enough storage space on-site, or do you need to consider off-site storage options?
• What kind of data will you need for your business?
• What is your budget for the hardware and software required?
• How many human resources can you expend for support?
• What is your data retention period?
• Do you need historical insights or real-time data?
• What is the purpose of your warehouse? Operational or analytical?
• How many people will need access to the data? How often will they need access?
• Is it a short-term endeavor, or do you need it in the long term?

Discussing these questions with internal stakeholders will most likely give you all the information. You can use these insights to devise the ideal strategy for your warehouse.

Best Practices for Data Warehousing

You can adopt several best practices to efficiently manage your data warehousing process before you start working on your plan. The following strategies can help you mitigate certain potential errors or difficulties along the way:

• Keeping stakeholders involved since inception: Involving stakeholders from the beginning is crucial, as they are the primary users of the warehouse. Incorporating feedback from all departments increases the likelihood of the warehouse being successful and meeting their needs.
• Data governance: A data warehouse system is only as good as the data. Implementing data governance processes will help you maintain excellent data quality for valuable analytics. You can use Acceldata's data quality observability platform to ensure the best data quality.
• Defining roles: Defining who will perform which operations on the data (read, write, or update) is essential. This will ensure data integrity. However, it is important to maintain a balance between security and flexibility for effective implementation of the warehouse.
• Designing warehouse schema: Your schema design should suit your business needs and the data warehouse technology. For example, a normalized structure of snowflake schema will need less storage and resources compared to a slightly de-normalized star schema. However, star schema processes data queries faster than snowflake schema.
• Adopting agile approach: It's best to divide the complete project into short cycles. Each cycle must have well-defined tasks and a testing plan in place to achieve the best results. This approach allows developers to receive timely feedback from all stakeholders, helping them enhance their system more effectively.
• Data observability with Acceldata: Your data pipeline needs to function smoothly so that the stakeholders can fully utilize data warehouse capabilities. Acceldata's data pipeline observability platform can facilitate this requirement for your organization.

Giants such as Amazon and UPS have already successfully implemented data warehousing within their systems. You can follow suit by adhering to the aforementioned best practices.

Techniques to Optimize Performance

You can optimize your warehouse performance by implementing certain important techniques. The following techniques help enhance query performance and data retrieval of the warehouse:

• Hardware and storage: Processing large datasets can be made easier by investing in scalable infrastructure, efficient data compressing, and high-end storage solutions.
• Indexing: Various types of indexes, such as clustered, non-clustered, and bitmap, serve different use cases for enhancing query execution.
• Materialized views: Materialized views provide faster query execution as they store the results of complex queries. These views are beneficial for aggregations and pre-calculated results.
• Partitioning: Separating large tables into small, manageable parts improves data access and query execution. You can choose from range partitioning, list partitioning, and hash partitioning as per your needs.
• Query optimization: Writing efficient queries can help optimize warehouse performance. You can also use query analyzer and optimizer tools for this purpose.

Implementing Scalable Data Warehouse

The data warehouse model and architecture strategies will help you finalize a warehouse that can achieve the desired results. Additionally, following the best practices and techniques, as Acceldata always does, will significantly improve your warehouse's performance.

Optimizing your data warehouse is essential to maximize your investment. You can rely on Acceldata to keep your data warehouse functioning optimally at all times.

Get in touch with Acceldata today to build your data warehouse and scale your data observability and insights.