Data Warehouses Can Save You TimeIt is a common difficulty for business managers everywhere. You have information stored on your company's computer system. With proper analysis of this information, you feel you could increase sales, cut expenses and earn yourself a great promotion. But every time you try to perform a computer analysis of this information, your coworkers moan and groan because their computers slow down. If you ever have to try it, you might have to stay late, or come in before most workers arrive. And there is far too much information to even consider analyzing it without computer support. Is there a way to get the statistics you want without slowing down everyone else's work? Yes! Many companies have solved these problems by using data warehouses. For those not familiar, data warehouse technology uses a computer system that works as a storage unit. This storage system is separate from your working computers, or the computers your employees use for day-to-day business operations. The reason these data warehouses are separate machines is that this separate machine allows you to compile, sort and analyze data without interfering with or slowing down the computers used for daily operations. Say, for instance, you work at a newspaper. Each day one person must upload the day's news articles onto a computer system for storage and retrieval if any of the journalists need the information contained in them for research. If you using the same computer system as your news editor, you can run into a big problem. While you are uploading these articles, the news editor building pages for the day's paper at the same time. The result is both activities run slower than usual, and could lead to an unproductive and inefficient workday. If, however, you can archive these articles using a different computer system and data warehouse software, this process does not pull computer power away from the task of building the paper. Therefore, the paper gets to print quicker, and the whole day's work is much more efficient and cost-effective. These data warehouses also work the same way if you want to analyze your archived data. Let's continue with our newspaper example. If we wanted to see how many fatal car accidents a particular county had experienced in one year, we could use the data warehouse to search for this information without interfering or stealing power from other computers. With data warehouses you can analyze all sorts of data without taxing other computers. If you want to save yourself and your employees frustrating moments, trying to work with slow computers, you might want to check out data warehouses. These systems serve as a storehouse for data and files. Since they are separate from your main system, there is no slow period when someone needs access to files for analysis and profit taking. |