Data is king in the world of business today, making directional decision-making richer and easier for executives. And relatedly, data warehouses have gained in popularity. We know you’ve heard of data warehouses, but we want to make sure you understand all the details about the popular Business Intelligence (BI) data stores. As a Microsoft Dynamics AX customer, you probably have some questions and likely don’t know where to begin and how to fit any time to research software into your schedule. This article will aim to give Dynamics AX users a head start on comprehending the product category and pinpoint your own data warehousing needs.
Today’s commercial data warehouses are available as “out of the box” solutions, ready for AX and other source data to be replicated to the platform. Some consultants specialize in extracting, transferring, and loading (ETL) data, so they can install the software and establish automation of ETL for your warehouse, so your data loads. After initial setup, a consultant can accelerate, optimize, and simplify your data queries from the data warehouse for financial reporting, planning, and/or data visualization processes. Once you have deployed the warehouse and trained on how to use it, you can manage the software yourself, without the IT team’s involvement.
If we said that data warehouses are multi-dimensional databases, you probably still wouldn’t be able to envision the product. That’s understandable – and the truth is that you aren’t going to be able to literally picture a data warehouse because it is not a physical product. They do not sit on a shelf in your server room. Data warehouses are digital databases providing storage on its own or on a shared server. Sometimes, our clients associate data warehouses with external hard drives, which digitally store diverse file types, applications, and/or software. On the other hand, warehouses store multiple types of transactional and operational data all on one platform. If you take a spreadsheet and give it multiple dimensions, you would get a data warehouse, which structures your company information in consolidated, dynamic, and direct ways, while avoiding error with today’s database-driven functionality.
When should you be considering a data warehouse for implementation? We suggest: when you are tired of manual documentation, errors, and management of your data in a program like Excel, start shopping around for a warehouse solution. If you are also dealing with a sluggish AX sever when multiple users are querying larger sets of data at the same time, you can get the stability and high performance with a data warehouse. An additional business need you might be feeling: your company requires data from multiple sources, like sales or payroll systems, for reporting, budgeting and/or dashboards. A unified database, like a data warehouse, can help you consolidate all of your source data in one place.
To continue learning more about data warehousing for Dynamics AX, read the rest of this article here.
The post Data Warehousing for Dynamics AX appeared first on AKA Enterprise Solutions.
