The process of taking data from different systems and putting it into a data warehouse for business analysis can be a complicated affair. In this article, we look at what is involved and how the cloud has made matters potentially trickier.

A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. It usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but it can include data from other sources..

Both the volume and velocity of data growth in recent years are unprecedented. An IDC report found that digital data more than doubles every two years and will reach 44 zettabytes by 2020, 37 percent of which will be useful when analyzed.

To get data-driven insights which drive smarter business decisions, enterprises that collect data from many sources must have somewhere to store it for analysis. Businesses also need to store data for other uses, such as..