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An Insider Look at the Key Approaches and Architecture of Astera Data Warehouse Builder
Data is perhaps the most valuable resource for any organization. And leveraging it the right way can be critical to success. To meet your BI initiatives, you need an agile, responsive data warehouse architecture that can deliver accurate, trusted insights to your decision-makers.
Astera Software recently introduced its next-gen data warehouse automation solution to help businesses kickstart their data analytics journey.
Ibrahim Surani and Mike A. O’Quinn sat down to discuss what Astera Data Warehouse Builder (DW Builder) is all about and how it makes the lives of developers and business users a breeze. Let’s take a closer look at the key concepts and architecture of our latest solution.
A Glance at Astera DW Builder
Astera DW Builder is a metadata-driven data warehouse automation tool that brings unprecedented agility and speed to data warehouse development. It has a rich array of functionalities to simplify and accelerate business processes, from DW design to publishing data and everything in between.
The end-to-end data warehouse builder automates ETL/ELT and data modeling tasks, eliminating the need for repetitive, time-consuming SQL hand-coding. The zero-code environment significantly cuts down design and development time to provide insights to the BI teams 80 times faster.
As a result, you can achieve your time-to-market data management targets in a matter of days and weeks versus months and years.
A Modern Approach to Building a Data Warehouse
With a signature focus on automation and speeding up the development work, Astera DW Builder offers a modern, iterative way to build your data warehouse. It serves as a unified platform that allows you to extract data stored in different sources, create data models, build solid dimensional models, and populate data from multiple sources in a no-code environment.
Why is a Modern Approach Necessary?
When building a data warehouse through a legacy approach, the thought process is scattered among different people and tools. Trivial changes like adding or removing fields require a tremendous amount of work and coordination. With such an approach, a typical warehousing project can take months or years.
Moreover, strategic changes like changing data structure can push your project well beyond the deadline, resulting in backlogs for IT teams and dissatisfaction among the business users.
On the other hand, using a modern platform to launch a new data warehouse results in an agile and flexible development process.
Furthermore, a modern approach offers better support for data warehouse automation tools, and solutions like Astera DWB to expedite your data warehouse project.
Build from Scratch or Modernize Your Legacy DW
Greenfield Projects
Astera DW Builder is designed to facilitate enterprises in building a data warehouse from scratch. Using its metadata-driven architecture, you can deploy enterprise data warehouses 80% faster by dramatically cutting down the time spent in the development, deployment, and maintenance phases.
Legacy Data Warehouse Modernization
Astera DW Builder also allows you to modernize your legacy data warehouse. It supports the transition from legacy databases, file and operational systems to modern technologies to improve data structure and maximize efficiency for data storage and retrieval.
Astera DW Builder offers native connectivity to popular cloud data warehouse providers, like Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, and more. The platform guarantees code consistency by automatically generating code native to your target platform.
As a result, you enjoy unprecedented development speeds and take advantage of cloud platforms’ high processing power and scalability.
Astera DW Builder isn’t tied to any database or topology. You can set up your data warehouse on cloud or on-premises, or even design a hybrid solution where part of a data warehouse is on the cloud and some on-prem as per your business needs.
A Powerful Data Modeling Tool
Astera DW Builder’s built-in data modeler is much richer than the traditional ones in the market. Its functionalities go beyond creating physical schema, which is just the start of the solution-building process. The entire product revolves around data modeling.
For instance, the data modeling tool allows users to convert many interventions into a dimensional model. Once it’s created, you can update it, modify it, refine it, and perfect it. Subsequently, you can forward the engineer to replicate it into a physical database for real-time data analysis.
The forward engineering component can be used in several top databases such as Oracle, Sequence Server, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Vertica, and so on.
Architecture Powering the Product
Astera DW Builder has a metadata-driven architecture. It has a parallel processing engine that allows you to go from source to insights at unprecedented speeds. The unified platform enables you to import, design, configure, develop, populate, consume, and analyze data efficiently.
Identify and Model Your Source Data
Using Astera DW Builder, you bring data with 40+ sources, including SAP, Oracle, SQL Server, Azure, and more. You can design and configure your source database and define the relationship between entities. You can also reverse engineer a source database and modify it.
Build Your Destination Model
You can build your dimensional model from the ground up or leverage your data model to enrich it with fact and dimension configurations. You can assign facts and dimensions to entities in bulk, make configurations to optimize the process, and define indexing options.
Populate Your Data Warehouse
Our powerful ETL engine with drag and drop connectors enables you to load facts and dimensions to populate your data warehouse seamlessly. You can apply 600+ transformations to profile and clean your source data. Also, you can execute ETL/ELT jobs with a click of a button.
Visualize and Analyze (OData Service)
Astera DWB has a built-in OData service module to allow you to make data available to industry-leading visualization tools, like Power BI, Tableau, Domo, and more. It adds a layer of virtualization on top of your data model to allow you to create as many data marts and data lakes as you want.
What Sets Astera DW Builder Apart?
Astera DW Builder is built upon an industrial-strength ETL engine that is refined by years of use by Fortune 1000 companies. It follows an iterative approach, simplifying the data warehouse building process.
The platform allows you to build your data warehouse in an iterative manner. You can rapidly test each aspect and deploy the best version of the data warehouse conforming to the business reporting needs.
The zero-code, metadata-driven architecture has enhanced automation capabilities that compress design time from years to months, months to weeks, and weeks to days.
The SQL tasks that Astera DW Builder can perform are challenging to pull off otherwise, especially when dealing with so many kinds of database syntax. It automatically generates complex SQL statements that are tedious and time-consuming to write manually.
The platform supports SQL generation for all types of transactional systems and databases, including the cloud databases such as Snowflake, Redshift, etc.
In a nutshell, Astera DW Builder is an agile solution that streamlines your data warehouse building process and allows you to refocus resources on optimizing data processes and generating winning results.
Want to find out more about how Astera DW Builder can accelerate your data warehouse development project?
Authors:
Ammar Ali
