Data mining is the process of hunting for nuggets or gems of information, stored deep inside data pools. Whilst historically, miners used manual labor, the data miners of today use corporate intelligence solutions to access and interpret data. As companies have become more sophisticated and more dependent on data, the quantity of data they use has massively increased. The phrase “big data” refers to the huge amount of data businesses have to sift through to locate those prized nuggets. For instance, consider a major retailer, with a gift registry and several point of sale, inventory and sales promotion systems.
All of these systems contain helpful information that may be mined to facilitate smarter decision making. Nonetheless, these systems can not be interconnected, which makes it harder to gain any meaningful insight. Data warehouse solutions South Africa are used to obtain details from different legacy systems, convert the information into widely used formats, then upload it into storage. This procedure is referred to as Extract, Transform and Load (ETL). After the details are merged and standardized, it is possible to manipulate the data.
Initially, all of this back office consolidation occurred at predetermined times, like once per day, once per week, or perhaps once per month. Frequently, intervals were required, because data warehouse solutions South Africa had to be offline throughout these procedures. A business operating round the clock simply could not afford the necessary downtime to keep their data warehouse filled with the latest data. Based on how frequently this procedure was conducted, the data might be outdated and no longer useful. Although this might have been tolerable in the eighties or nineties, it is not acceptable in today’s dynamic, interconnected world.
EFL in real time has been developed subsequently, which allows for non invasive, continuous data warehousing. Nowadays, whilst the majority of data warehouse solutions South Africa are able to mine, extract, convert, and upload data consistently without service interruption, that is not all there is to it. Actually, data mining is only the start.
Once the data is mined, you require some kind of enterprise reporting to interpret the huge intake of data. Previously, enterprise reporting needed considerable expertise to maintain and set up. Generally, users were offered a range of pre made reports, outlining different data functions or points. Whilst some reports might have had a degree of in built customization, like user specified date ranges, the customization was restricted. If users required special reports, they had to ask people in the IT department to produce or amend reports, depending on their requirements. This might take weeks and often, it never got done, due to the associated politics and hassle.
Happily, modern data warehouse solutions South Africa have made business reporting much more user friendly. Intuitive dashboards and controls make generating customized reports an easy matter of dragging and dropping, whilst data visualization equipment makes the data simple to understand. Better still, these tools are usable on demand, which facilitates accurate, ad hoc business reporting in real time.