The quickly changing landscape of data integration creates lots of questions about ‘the best’ tools and data integration techniques. This blog provides information about if and how you should ingest your data into a cloud data warehouse and which tools and methods are best for different situations.
The landscape of data integration is going through an overhaul right now; it is a long overdue shift towards the flexibility and scalability that cloud-based architecture and tools have brought us. But with this shift comes confusion and fatigue. What is the best tool for my use case? How should I ingest my data? Where should I store my data? Which cloud provider is best for what I want to do? Should I even ingest my data into a cloud data warehouse?
Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.
There are countless reasons to remain on-premise for your transactional applications – stability, sunk infrastructure cost, familiarity, etc. But there are significantly fewer reasons to remain on-premise for your analytics stack. The cloud brings advantages to your analytics stack that are difficult, or even impossible, to perform in an on-premise environment, including the ability to scale compute or storage at the click of a button, ingest new data sources in minutes, and take advantage of SaaS offerings. It’s never been easier to create a unified view into all of your data.
So should you ingest your data into a cloud data warehouse? Our opinion is a resounding YES but ask yourself these questions.
If you answered yes to any of the questions above, it might be time to move to a modern data stack.
This depends on your business needs, current environment, and overall organizational goals. But, each cloud provider has certain high level benefits that we’ve identified below.
Want more information on a specific technology? Our consultants are highly trained to help review, select, and implement the best business intelligence technologies to meet your needs.
In today’s ecosystem, there’s really no reason to not use a cloud data warehouse. The elasticity and the near-limitless potential of compute that a cloud data warehouse brings is unparalleled by any other approach. This can help democratize data access across your entire organization. In terms of which cloud data warehouse you should use, again, this depends on your needs and goals. Below are some of our favorites and why you might use them.
There are a couple different ways you may want to pull your data into your data warehouse. The method you choose depends on the cloud architecture that you are implementing. Are you going to use a data lake? What is your cost sensitivity? How frequently does your data need to be ingested? Each of these answers will impact the data ingestion techniques and tools that are best for you.
Here are some data ingestion methods that we frequently use with our clients:
A lot needs to be taken into account to answer this question – your current cloud provider, what other technology you use, how custom you need your environment to be, how feature-rich you want your tool, and more. If you are still unsure about which route to go, or if you have a specific use case question, we offer a complimentary data strategy session, where one of our analytics experts can consult with your company about your data integration needs and how it fits into your overall data strategy.
To thrive with your data, your people, processes, and technology must all be data-focused. This may sound daunting, but we can help you get there. Sign up to meet with one of our analytics experts who will review your data struggles and help map out steps to achieve data-driven decision making.
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