GigaOm Radar for Data Warehousesv5.0

1. Executive Summary

Data warehouses store and process data to provide meaningful business insight. They are foundational to many organizations’ data management strategies. In contrast to transactional databases (optimized to handle large volumes of record-by-record transactions), data warehouses are specifically optimized for analysis of aggregated, historical data.

Data warehouses consolidate information from all of an organization’s internal and external data sources and store it in a central repository. Specific design choices allow them to facilitate fast analytics over large volumes of data, including a dimensional model or star schema, massively parallel processing, columnar storage, vector processing or single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) operations, and data compression. Data must often meet strict quality requirements to be loaded into the data warehouse. Thus, in addition to helping organizations centralize, organize, and derive meaningful insight from their data, data warehouses also play an indirect role in ensuring data quality.

Data warehouses form the cornerstone of many organizations’ “data stacks,” and are important to all levels of business and all personas. Data engineers cleanse, structure, organize, and model the data. Database administrators monitor and maintain the data warehouse on the back end. Business users, business analysts, and data analysts access the cleansed and organized data in the warehouse through client applications, such as business intelligence (BI) applications, to extract meaningful insights about the business. These insights are presented in reports, visualizations, or dashboards, answering executive and C-suite questions and forming the basis for strategic decisions of the business.

This is our fifth year evaluating the data warehouse space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 14 of the top data warehouse solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading data warehouse offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.