A list of the best open source and commercial Data Warehousing Tools and techniques to store, manage, and analyze data for better insights and decision-making.
In today’s rapidly growing computing world, big data & predictive analysis have grown at a quite faster pace.
During all this transformation in business intelligence over the past few years, the data warehouse has proven to be a continuous and reliable technique in managing the integrated data.
Table of Contents:
What is a Data Warehouse?
Data warehouse is a system that is used for reporting and data analysis. It is considered to be the core of business intelligence (BI) as all the analytical sources revolve around the data warehouse.
DWH is a central repository that stores current as well as historical data in one place. It contains integrated data from different sources and is used to prepare analytical reports which further get distributed to the knowledge workers in the enterprise.
These reports help the organizations to understand/predict their sales patterns and design the marketing strategies accordingly.
How is Data Processed in a Data Warehouse?
This can be well understood by taking the reference of the basic architecture of DWH.
All the operational sources place data into a staging area (staging tables/databases/schemas etc.) This data might need to pass through an operational data store that would cleanse the data. Data is cleansed to ensure data quality before it is used for reporting.
Data warehouses that operate on typical Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) methodology use staging databases, integration layers and access layers to carry out their functions. Staging databases store raw data coming from each data source and the integrating layer integrates it.
The integrated data is further arranged into hierarchical structures called dimensions. The cataloged data is made available to managers and professionals to carry out activities like data mining, market research, and decision support.
So far we have discussed the data warehouse in detail, let us now move on to another extremely interesting question
What are the most popular data warehousing software that are available in the market and how do you choose one?
Data warehouses are the future of every company. Hence, before picking up a final tool, one should make sure that the tool is capable of meeting the growth and comprehensive requirements of the organization in the present as well as in the future.
List of Top Data Warehouse Tools
Here are the most popular data warehousing platforms that are available on the market.
Let’s Explore!!
#1) Integrate.io
Availability: Licensed
Integrate.io is a cloud-based data integration platform that allows you to create simple, visualized data pipelines for your data warehouse. This will bring all your data sources together. With Integrate.io you will be able to centralize all your metrics and sales tools like your automation, CRM, customer support systems, etc.
Integrate.io is an elastic and scalable platform for data integration. It can work with structured and unstructured data. It can integrate data with a variety of sources like SQL data stores, NoSQL databases, and cloud storage services.
Key Features:
- Integrate.io can be integrated with a variety of sources like SQL data stores, NoSQL databases, and cloud storage services.
- It can work with relational databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon RDS, etc.
- You will be able to connect with online analytical data stores such as AWS Redshift and Google BigQuery.
#2) Skyvia
Availability: Licensed
Skyvia is a no-code cloud data service that allows you to integrate, manage, access, and back up your business data in a convenient web-based interface. It offers ETL, ELT and Reverse ETL scenarios and supports all major cloud apps, databases and data warehouses.
Skyvia Data Integration allows you to easily load all your data to a single data warehouse for further analytics and reporting, and, if necessary, also to load the enriched data back (Reverse ETL process) to your business apps to improve operational work.
Additionally Skyvia offers a cloud-to-cloud backup solution, online SQL query builder and API server-as-a-service to expose data as Odata or SQL endpoints for real time data access.
Features:
- Flexible pricing plans, starting from a completely free plan.
- Wide range of data integration scenarios for any use case.
- Highly customizable ETl, ELT and Reverse ETL solution.
- Ability to visually create data pipelines with data orchestration capabilities.
- Perform multi-stage data transformations.
- Automate integrations whenever possible.
#3) Amazon Redshift
Availability: Licensed
Amazon Redshift is an excellent data warehouse product which is a very critical part of Amazon Web Services – a very famous cloud computing platform.
Redshift is a fast, well-managed data warehouse that analyses data using the existing standard SQL and BI tools. It is a simple and cost-effective tool that allows running complex analytical queries using smart features of query optimization.
It handles analytics workload pertaining to big data sets by utilizing columnar storage on high-performance disks and massively parallel processing concepts.
One of its very powerful features is the Redshift spectrum, which allows the user to run queries against unstructured data directly in Amazon S3. This eliminates the need for loading and transformation. It automatically scales query computing capacity depending on the data. Hence the queries are executed fast.
#4) Teradata
Availability: Licensed
Teradata is another market leader when it comes to database services and products. It is an internationally renowned company with its headquarters in Ohio. Most of the competitive enterprise organizations use Teradata DWH for insights, analytics & decision making.
Teradata DWH is a relational database management system marketed by Teradata organization. It has two divisions i.e. data analytics & marketing applications. It works on the concept of parallel processing and allows users to analyze data in a simple yet efficient manner.
An interesting feature of this data warehouse is its data segregation into hot & cold data. Here cold data refers to less frequently used data and this is the tool in the market these days.
#5) Oracle 12c
Availability: Licensed
Oracle is a well-established name for the data warehousing platform that was built to provide business insights and analytics to users. Oracle 12c is a standard when it comes to scalability, high performance, and optimization in data warehousing. It targets increasing operational efficiency and thereby optimizing the end-user experience.
The key features can be tabulated as:
- Advanced analytics and enhanced data sets.
- Increased innovation and industry-specific insights.
- The maximum big data value.
- Profitability
- Extreme Performance & consolidation.
Additionally, Oracle 12c comes with advanced features like Flash storage and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression) that enable high-level data compression.
#6) Informatica
Availability: Licensed
Informatica is a well-established and reliable name in data warehousing these days and was launched in 1993. The Informatica organization has its headquarters in California. It holds a very good portfolio of data integration, ETL, B2B data integration, virtualization of data and information lifecycle management.
Informatica power center constitutes of three main components:
- Client tools: Installed on developer machines.
- Power Centre repository: A place to store metadata for an application.
- Power center server: Server to perform data executions.
With a growing customer base, Informatica is continuously trying to leverage its data integration solutions. This tool has inbuilt powerful mapping templates to help in managing data in an efficient manner.
#7) IBM Infosphere
Availability: Licensed
IBM Infosphere is an excellent ETL tool which uses graphical notations to execute data integration activities.
It provides all the major building blocks of data integration and data warehousing along with data management and governance. The building foundation of this warehousing architecture is a Hybrid Data Warehouse (HDW) and Logical Data Warehouse (LDW).
Multiple data warehousing technologies are comprised of a hybrid data warehouse to ensure that the right workload is handled on the right platform. It helps in proactive decision making and streamlining the processes. It reduces cost and is a very effective tool in terms of business agility.
This tool helps in delivering intensive projects by providing reliability, scalability, and improved performance. It ensures the delivery of trusted information to the end-users.
#8) Ab Initio Software
Availability: Licensed
Ab Initio company holds a specialty in high volume data processing and integration.
Being launched in 1995, Ab Initio provides user-friendly data warehousing products for parallel data processing applications. It aims at helping organizations to perform fourth generation data analysis activities, data manipulation, batch processing, quantitative and qualitative data processing.
It is a GUI-based software that targets at easing off the extract, transform and load tasks.
Ab Initio software is a licensed product as the company prefers to maintain a high level of privacy regarding their products. People working on this product operate under an agreement of non-disclosure, called NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) which prevents them from disclosing Ab Initio technical information publicly.
#9) ParAccel (acquired by Actian)
Availability: Open Source
ParAccel is a California-based software organization that deals in data warehousing and database management industry. ParAccel was acquired by Actian in 2013
It provides DBMS software to organizations across all the sectors. Two mainly offered products by the company include Maverick & Amigo. Maverick is a standalone datastore itself, however, Amigo is designed to optimize query processing speed that is generally redirected to an existing database.
Amigo was later on discarded by ParAccel and Maverick was promoted. Maverick has gradually evolved into a ParAccel database that works on shared-nothing architecture and supports columnar orientation.
#10) Cloudera
Availability: Open Source
Cloudera which is a US-based software company provides Apache-Hadoop based services and software. Cloudera was announced available for distribution in 2009, including Apache Hadoop in collaboration.
CDH (Cloudera Distribution including Apache Hadoop) is an enterprise version which has three editions i.e. Basic, Flex & Datahub. It can be downloaded free of cost from the Cloudera’s website. The restriction with the free version is that it comes with no technical support.
#11) AnalytiX DS
Analytix DS specializes in tools for data mapping and integration along with management tools.
It well supports enterprise-level integration and big data services. Mike Boggs is the founder of Analytics who invented the term pre-ETL mapping. It has its headquarters in Virginia and has offices spread over Asia and North America. Nowadays, Analytix has a huge international team of service partners and assistants.
It is expected to come up with a new development center in Bangalore soon.
#12) MarkLogic
Being launched in 2001, MarkLogic is an enterprise software firm that offers a NoSQL database platform. It had a great shift in the data warehousing market in 2014 when it got included in the Gartner’s magic quadrant on DWH.
It brought a revolution in the data warehousing market as the other organizations were also showing interest in NoSQL form of data processing and storage. It is being looked upon as a new reality in the data center architecture and is expected to reduce data complexity.
MarkLogic introduced semantics-based technologies that represent the next level of innovation when it comes to the growing needs of technology.
#13) Panoply: The Smart Data Warehouse
Panoply is the only smart data warehouse that automates and simplifies all three key aspects of the data lifecycle i.e. data integration, data management, and query performance optimization.
- Panoply allows you to ingest data from any source with just a few clicks. This takes minutes, not days, which means business users no longer depend on IT/Data Engineering for ETL processes.
- Data governance and security are built into the Panoply platform. Stored data is protected from malicious attacks as well as common mistakes that humans might make while accessing data. You can maintain full control over access permissions for every user in your organization.
- Panoply learns as you use it. Queries are saved, cached, and continuously optimized, thereby saving your time across all your data analytics reporting tasks. This means lightning-fast queries to fuel any BI tool or statistical package.
With Panoply, you can get data analytics stacked up and running with just a few clicks, thereby saving time, resources, and cost for any size business operating in any industry vertical.
Some Additional Tools
The above-mentioned tools are the top market leaders in data warehousing these days. However, there are some more competitive candidates on the list that are no less in any way.
Hence we have listed them as well for your reference!!
Talend
Talend is an open-source tool owned by Talend organization for data warehousing. It is a very powerful data integration and ETL tool. Its advanced features make it easy to use and have attracted many users too. It provides progressive business solutions while having a comparatively lower cost.
Alteryx
Alteryx is a revolutionary tool in data warehousing extractions, transformations and loads. It gives feasibility to access large volumes of data quickly at a much faster pace regardless of the data size, location or format. It has a self-service data analytics feature that provides insights in hours and not weeks.
Numetic
Numetic is another powerful tool that provides a new way to think about BI. It auto connects, cleanses and filters data and provides data that matters to the user. It instantly filters millions of data rows and provides a personal data warehouse.
Hyperion
Hyperion is a multi-dimensional platform built upon analytic applications. It is built upon Essbase which later got merged with Hyperion. However, due to marketing challenges, Hyperion again renamed its products in 2005 declaring it as Hyperion System9 BI+ Analytic Services.
Essbase supports two storage options i.e. ‘dense’ or ‘sparse’. It utilizes sparsity to minimize memory usage and space requirements.
SAP Business Warehouse
SAP Business Warehouse provides automated support in managing stocks in the warehouse. It is a flexible system and supports scheduled logistic processing within the data warehouse. This warehouse environment is completely integrated into the SAP environment.
Pervasive
Pervasive has helped numerous business challenges related to data management across a wide range of industries. It is quite reliable and scalable. It is one of the most cost-effective platforms available in the market. It provides brilliant support in data migration, B2B gateways, data warehousing, etc.
Netezza
Netezza is an art of IBM pure system services. It provides an expert, built-in integrated system that simplifies the user experience with its unique design. It has key design features of speed, simplicity, scalability and analytical power.
Greenplum
Greenplum is a big analytics organization in California. It is a division of EMC and is expected to be the future of big data. Greenplum product uses MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) technique consisting of master nodes, standby nodes, and segment nodes. It is a popular and less expensive technology.
Kalido
Kalido (by magnitude) enables its clients to maintain and deploy data warehouses much easier and faster than conventional Export, Transfer & Load (ETL) based methodologies. It has set standards in automation and agility.
Keboola
Keboola is a cloud-oriented software that uses a cloud-based platform to help the organizations to integrate, enhance and distribute/publish critical information for internal data research and analytics.
NetApp
NetApp is a data management company that provides services to manage and store data. It gives the flexibility to manage data in hybrid cloud environments. It is a very efficient tool containing in-built management tools that are designed to work together. It gives the best data management to increase business agility.
ProfitBase
Profitbase is a very reliable and scalable approach to business intelligence solutions. It delivers faster and better information with a low ownership cost which makes it quite cost-effective.
ProfitBase empowers businesses by providing deeper insights into business trends thereby exposing future opportunities in a better manner. It helps organizations to have a glimpse of future trends and make decisions accordingly.
Vertica
Vertica’s SQL Data Warehouse is trusted by the world’s leading data-driven companies, including Bank of America, Cerner, Etsy, Intuit, Uber and more to deliver speed, scale and reliability on mission-critical analytics.
Vertica combines the power of a high-performance, massively parallel processing SQL query engine with advanced analytics and machine learning so you can unlock the true potential of your data with no limits and no compromises.
BIME
BIME by Zendesk is easy to use software for anyone to do data analytics.
It easily integrates data from different sources and creates custom reports, dashboards and metrics much faster when compared to the other software. It also works on no SQL approach which is yet another powerful feature of BIME. It is a rapidly growing central point for the entire organization’s reporting needs.
Final Thoughts
There are several options that are available to companies in data warehouse tools. This, in turn, lays stress over the importance of proper analysis of organizational requirements and needs before picking any tool.
Suggested reading =>> Top ETL Automation Tools
It is always better to be prepared with a clear picture of the current requirements and future patterns beforehand. Being the central repository, the data warehouse is extremely important to any organization in any sector and hence the choice of the correct tool is a must.
We hope that this article was of immense help in understanding the key features of the available tools along with the top 10 tools in the list.
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