Businesses use all their resources to gain profitability, growth, stability, and efficiency. Today, a company’s data is a key resource not only for the usual business objectives, but also to be more competitive and to survive market jolts and other disruptions. Company data is stored separately in various transaction systems such as CRM, HCM, e-commerce, SCM, ERP, project management, and other data sources. Business intelligence (BI) software is used by companies to support a wide range of business decisions. But to be effective, BI software needs a consolidated source of data, and this is provided by a data warehouse.
What is data warehouse software?
BI software is highly effective because it can analyze comprehensive data coming from all relevant data sources. It’s not ideal for a BI software to get this data from each transaction database as the transaction happens. A data warehouse software is software designed to centralize the storage of integrated data from different sources. It is a system of technologies and components that facilitate the extraction of data from multiple transaction databases so that the analysis and reporting functions of a BI system are more efficient, up-to-date, and comprehensive.
Read also: The Best Business Intelligence (BI) Tools and Software for 2021
Benefits of data warehouse software
A data warehouse helps a business in the strategic use of its data. Data warehouse tools provide companies an exact but separate copy of its operational database where users can get historical and current information. A few benefits of data warehouse solutions are to:
- Provide a large and extensive storage of historical company data for insight
- Enable the conversion of data to a standard and high-quality format
- Help business and data analysts gather data and generate reports from a readily available source without requiring technical assistance
- Improve the scope and speed of BI software and data analytics in performing their function
- Facilitate better decision making that helps drive company revenue.
Best Data Warehouse Software & Tools for 2021
By helping a company better organize its data, understand it, and gain insight, a data warehouse software can quickly pay for its cost with a high return on investment. The best data warehouse software enables precise analytical reporting and intelligent decision making. It provides a structure or environment where other systems such as BI, data lakes, and AI can integrate, on-premise or in the cloud. It allows users to work on significant size of accurate data for reporting, visualization, advanced analytics, or machine learning. Here is a list of our recommended data warehouse software in no particular order.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is an intuitive solution that allows businesses and IT to make confident decisions. It is a unified data and analytics solution that provides the data warehouse as a service layer, so users can connect, transform, model, and visualize their data. Built on SAP HANA in-memory technology, it allows an organization to combine both SAP and non-SAP data to provide an enterprise-ready data warehouse that delivers real-time insights. It includes data management capabilities, natural language translation, scalability, security, and data governance functionalities.
VMware Tanzu Greenplum
VMware Tanzu Greenplum is a data warehouse software that utilizes the open source Greenplum PostgreSQL database. It is a massively parallel data platform for analytics, machine learning, and AI. Users are able to consolidate data and converge analytic and operational workloads in a single environment. The data warehouse can be deployed flexibly on-premise, on public or private clouds, and on containers running analytics on Kubernetes. It can be easily integrated with other open source applications and can handle streaming data and cloud data.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a data cloud platform that offers data warehouse-as-a-service. It promotes a single data platform in the cloud that bridges data sources and data users, so a single copy of data allows users to run many workloads. Aside from a data warehouse, it can serve data engineering applications, data lake for both structured and unstructured data, data science, data applications, and data sharing. It is a single location to unify data warehouses, be compliant with data privacy regulations, and create modern integrated data apps for the enterprise, customers, and business partners.
Panoply
Panoply lets you sync, store, and access all your business data from multiple sources. It is a data warehouse software with extract, transform, and load (ETL) features. Sync data from cloud software like Salesforce and HubSpot, or replicate relational databases. It can automatically transform NoSQL data and sync, parse, and structure CSV, XLS, JSON, and log files into easy-to-access tables. It allows users to get their data warehouse live quickly without using codes or IT assistance.
Teradata Vantage
Teradata Vantage is a cloud data analytics platform that lets users unify data warehouses, data lakes, analytics, and new data sources. From an integrated data platform, users are able to ask questions and utilize their data that impacts their business positively. It is a scalable solution that can handle massive data workloads of the enterprise. Other features include built-in AI and machine learning, and roles-based access that teams can take advantage of without coding.
IBM
IBM data warehouse solutions include on-premise, on cloud, and integrated appliance products. It includes built-in AI for deeper and faster analytics as well as an SQL engine for queries. IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud is a fully managed data warehouse offers scalable storage and computing resources. Other features include an optimized columnar data store, actionable compression, and in-memory processing. IBM Netezza Performance Server is an advanced analytics and data warehouse platform that can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is a fully managed database optimized for data warehouse workloads and big data. It is a cloud data warehouse service that automates provisioning, configuring, securing, tuning, scaling, patching, backing up, and repairing a data warehouse. A broad set of converged database capabilities enable simpler queries across multiple data types. Other features include machine learning analysis, simple data loading, and data visualizations.
Azure Synapse Analytics
Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics is an analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It is a scalable solution that can deliver insights fast. Users can apply machine learning models to applications to discover insights from all data. It also offers advanced security and privacy features, such as column-and row-level security and dynamic data masking. Synapse Analytics is an end-to-end analytics solutions for data engineers, DBAs, data scientists, and business analysts.
Amazon Redshift
Redshift is Amazon’s Cloud data warehouse software. Users can query and combine exabytes of structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, data lakes, and operational databases using SQL. It lets you save the results of queries that you can use with other Amazon analytics services. Some of the use cases for the software are for business intelligence, operational analytics on events, data as a service, and predictive analytics.
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery is a cloud data warehouse software that is highly scalable and cost-effective. It can analyze petabytes of data at high speed using ANSI SQL. Users can run analytics at scale with lower costs. Users can gain insights across clouds with a multi-cloud analytics solution. They can query streaming data in real time to get up-to-date information and predict business outcomes better with built-in machine learning tools. Create reports and dashboards and share them securely across the organization.
