Data Warehouse Consultants – What Do They Do And Why You Need One
A data warehouse consultant plays an important role in companies looking to become data-driven. They help companies design and deploy centralized data sets that are easy to use and reliable.
But in order to understand why you need a data warehouse consultant we should take a step back.
In this article we will not only discuss data warehouse consulting but also data warehouses and the role they play in your organization,.
What Is A Data Warehouse
In order to understand why you would need a data warehouse consultant, let’s first briefly go over what a data warehouse is.
A data warehouse is a central data repository that is designed to provide lightening fast analytical queries as well as make it easy for analysts to join data from various sources such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot.
The goal of data warehouses are to provide a source of true for your companies reporting and in many cases, machine learning needs.
What Do Data Warehouse Consultants Do
Data warehouse consultants can range in terms of the services they provide. Some are purely data architects. They will design how your data warehouse should look, but they may not implement it.
This is fine if you’re a large company or if the project you are working on is large and has another consultant that is doing the implementing.
But more than likely you will need a data warehouse consultant that will be implementing the entire solution end-to-end. End-to-end data consultants ensure that your data will go from your raw sources often all the way to your dashboards and machine learning models. This means they will also create your ETL/ELT(often called data pipelines generally) and even, in some cases, create your data visualizations and reports.
In order to be able to provide this service your data consultants likely will go through some form of data strategy questionnaire like this one. This will help provide insights into your companies business and technical needs.
Here are several other benefits data warehouse consultants can provide:
- They can help a company optimize their data warehouse for performance. This includes identifying and resolving bottlenecks, setting up indexing and partitioning, and configuring the database for optimal query performance.
- They can help a company with data governance. This includes ensuring data quality, implementing security and compliance measures, and setting up data lineage and auditing.
- They can provide training and ongoing support for the company’s data warehouse team. This includes training on the technology, best practices for data warehousing, and troubleshooting assistance.
- Finally, a data warehouse consultant can help a company make better use of their data. This includes identifying key metrics, setting up reports and dashboards, and providing insights that can inform business decisions.
How Can A Data Warehouse Benefit Me
Data warehouses provide many benefits for their clients. The very first question they’ll answer is, do you need a data warehouse (which we do for free). The truth is not everyone needs a data warehouse and a good consultant will let you know that. It doesn’t benefit anyone to build a data warehouse if at the end of the day, it goes unused.
So that’s their first value prop.
But more importantly, a good data warehouse consultant will help design, improve and implement your companies data warehouse. This in turn will help your company develop reporting and automation around your data. Whether that be KPIs or automated notifications and decision making. By creating a solid data warehouse that centralizes your companies data, your consultant will create a source of truth.
All in all, this is just a high level of the value a data warehouse consultant provides. Here are a few projects your data warehouse consultant might help you with.
Which Projects Can a Data Warehouse Consultant Help With?
Data warehouse consultants will take on all different forms of projects. In some cases they might be helping you build your data warehouse from scratch. In other cases they will be helping you with a data migration project. There really are a whole host of projects where data warehouse consultants are useful. Here is a further list.
Data Warehouse consultants can help with:
- Design your data model
- Develop an overall data strategy
- Data migration
- Centralizing siloed data sets
- Write data transformation
- Modern data stack architecture
These are just some of the projects your data warehouse consultant might help you with. It does depend how much they focus on end-to-end data projects. Some data warehouse consultants are purely focused on the design of your data warehouse and others may design and implement. So do make sure you ask how far your consultant will go in terms of data warehouse deployment.
In addition, your data warehouse consultant should also help you figure out which solution will be best for you.
What Tools Do Data Warehousing Consulting Work On
There are plenty of options in terms of best of breed data warehouses. There are also solutions these days that are more hybrid between a data lake and data warehouse (a data lakehouse) if you will. But here are some very common solutions that your data warehouse consultant might recommend.
How To Start Your Data Warehouse Project
Before looking to hire a data warehousing consultant, you will want to assess a few things. Here are just some high-level questions you should ask yourself before looking into a data warehouse consultant.
- Do you really need a data warehouse
- What business goals are you trying to drive with data
- Which data warehouse should your company pick
- What types of reports/use cases do you want to create
- How will you manage your data
Do you really need a data warehouse
To answer this question, you need to know where all your data is and how you really want to use it. If you’re not 100% sure on this, our team would be happy to have a 30 minute free consult with you to see if the answer is yes or no.
Data warehouses can provide a lot of value in terms of centralizing your data and making it easier for your data analysts to access. However, they also require experts to manage and maintain it. So even if you have a consultant build it, there will be future costs. So you need to make sure your company needs a data warehouse.
What business goals are you trying to drive with data
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they read that they need a data warehouse and then start looking for consultants. When you should first see if the idea of a data warehouse aligns with your business goals. To do this, first you should figure out what KPIs or OKRs align with your businesses goals. Once you have those you can work to figure out where you would get that data.
If your team doesn’t have the expertise or time to do this, then it might be time to hire a data consultant who can provide those insights for you. Our team has done this dozens of times for companies in multiple industries so feel free to reach out.
What types of reports do you want to create
Finally, what do you actually want to do with your data? Are there specific types of reports that you want to create? Are you looking to build automated reporting or use Excel?
Try to get a general idea of where you actually want to be in the future. Yes, a data warehouse consultant should help you do a lot of this. But having a general idea will help save time and ensure that the project runs even smoother.
How will you manage your data in the long term
Building a data warehouse is only step 0 in your companies journey of becoming data-driven. Another important aspect a top tier data warehouse consultant will consider is data governance, privacy and security. There is a lot of data that your company may have access to that could put them at risk. There are data breaches every day, some external others internal. A good data warehouse consultant will make sure that access management is set-up correctly. They will also work with your team to set-up policies in terms of how to continue to manage and maintain good practices.
So Should Your Hire A Data Warehouse Consultant?
Overall, if your team is looking to build a data warehouse and you either don’t have the time or expertise, then you should reach out to a data warehouse consultant. Most will provide some form of consultation that should be aimed at answering the most important question of “do you need a data warehouse”. The answer isn’t always yes.
But if you believe it is, then consider reaching out to us. We’d love to help guide your company on your data warehouse journey.
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