A buyer's guide to selecting the best data warehouse product

Editor's note

Despite the emergence of Hadoop and other big data technologies, the data warehouse is as relevant as ever. Data warehouses provide companies with a practical, proven way to analyze structured business data to support decision making.

As this buyer's guide demonstrates, there are numerous benefits from deploying and using a data warehouse product. These include helping organizations improve operations and business processes, thereby increasing revenue and raising profits. Designed for decision support and business intelligence activities, a data warehouse allows a company to analyze its historical data over time. This data is often aggregated so that it's easier to scan, access and query, providing users with multiple views of information presented in logical, easily understood groupings.  

There are four main types of data warehouse platforms: traditional relational database management systems, specialized analytics database management systems (DBMSs), appliances and cloud data warehouse offerings. The data warehouse environment can differ greatly across organizations, however, as these platforms can be deployed as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), data marts or a combination thereof. An EDW is used across an enterprise, whereas a data mart is smaller and focuses on individual or specific departmental needs. Depending on the size of your organization, you can create multiple data marts and integrate them with an EDW.

In addition to company size, several other factors go into determining which data warehouse product is right for your organization, including IT department size and availability of resources and budget considerations. Once you know which deployment option makes the most sense for your site, your next step is to investigate the capabilities of each platform type and match them to your needs. You can use the criteria outlined in this buyer's guide along with an analysis of the leading data warehouse products to help pinpoint which platform would work best.