Your new data warehouse
Introduction
Is your business looking to use data to boost sales, develop new products, or discover hidden insights? Chances are: yes. And you wouldn’t be alone. According to a 2024 Edge Delta article, “56% of data leaders reported increased big data and analytic budgets.” However, raw data is messy and hard to decipher. To use it effectively, you need a robust and secure process to clean, format, store, and access it.
Enter the data warehouse. A data warehouse is a processing and storage tool that sort data into tables, promote cleanliness, and make insights available to the rest of the business. This makes a data warehouse critical for any organization looking to invest more in their data.
If you belong to one of those organizations and need your own data warehouse, you have two options: build or buy. In this article, we’ll look at what to consider before buying a warehousing software or building your own.
What a data warehouse does
Data warehouses pull structured data—information organized into tables—from one or more sources into a central repository. Then, data engineers, scientists, and analysts can:
- Delve into your historical data to find trends and insights
- Create useable business intelligence (BI) dashboards
- Build workflows that clean and format raw data
Buy versus build
Should you buy a data warehousing software or build your own from scratch? Each option has pros and cons.
Buying a warehouse software, like Databricks or Snowflake, is expensive, but makes set up quick and easy. Keep the following in mind as you consider your options:
- Is your data sensitive? That is, does it contain personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI)?
- Do you need to follow regional data privacy laws or regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
- How will you authenticate access to your data? Do you need to share it with external users?
- Do you need strong data governance options?
- How often should your BI dashboards refresh? Should they show new data daily, hourly, or every second?
- Will you access data from a dedicated server, your work laptop only, or your phone?
If you find yourself adding more and more requirements, buying a warehouse will be the easiest way to meet them all. Otherwise, you may not want to pay for a software’s extra bells and whistles.
Building a data warehouse gives you full control over privacy and prevents getting “locked-in” to any one vendor. But it requires much more time and technical expertise. You’ll need a team of data engineers to create workflows, combine sources, and build analysis-ready tables. Along with these engineers, it requires an entire IT department—including information and security, development, and infrastructure teams—to build out the underlying technology. Ask yourself: Is greater control over privacy, data ownership, and infrastructure worth the extra time, effort, and money needed to build a warehouse from scratch?
Quick decision guide
In the end, the choice between buying and building depends on your organization’s security concerns, technological staffing capacity, and data processing requirements.
See the table below for some quick suggestions for common situations.
| Situation | Suggestion |
|---|---|
| Do you or your clients need exceptional data security? | Buy Most warehousing platforms on the market come with powerful, and well-documented, data security and protection tools. You’ll earn more trust from your clients using these standard tools. |
| Does your workflow involve proprietary or highly secure data sources? | Build If your data is proprietary, it may be easier to build your warehouse from scratch. This gives you more control of permissions and access controls. |
| Does your team lack experienced data engineers? | Buy Building a robust, reliable, and efficient data warehouse takes experience. If you don’t have a team of data engineers available, you’re better off buying a data warehousing platform instead. |
| Do you need to start digging into your data with advanced dashboards right now? | Buy Even with a crack team of engineers, building a proper data warehouse takes time. If you’re in a crunch for time, buying a data warehousing platform will get you running in days rather than weeks or months. |
| Are your warehouse requirements simple? | Build If you don’t need extra features beyond the warehouse itself, it’s cheaper to build only what you need than to buy a suite of tools you’ll never use. |
| Do you want to explore cutting-edge technology, like AI agents or model serving? | Buy Modern data warehousing platforms continuously update their services to keep up with the newest trends. If you want to explore these trends, including building AI into your data processes, these platforms will do the heavy lifting for you. |
Interested in learning more or getting started with your data warehouse adventure? Check out the resources below to learn about the data warehousing solutions: