ASTERA DW BUILDER PRODUCT LAUNCH
I was a guest speaker at the Astera DW Builder Product Launch on Wednesday, May 19. It was an interesting event for which you may want to get all the details if you are building a data warehouse, data mart or any analytic database on relational database technology or reevaluating what you have in terms of data warehouses and marts.
You can access a recording of the event here.
Highlights of the Event
Bill Inmon, the Father of Data Warehousing, began the event by talking about the data explosion, the value of the relational database, the qualities of the original data warehouse concept that still apply today, and how the data warehouse is more of an architecture today than just a database. He added that many are still treating the data warehouse as large multi-year projects when they should be built in small, fast iterations. Agile data warehousing prioritizes the delivery of a working data warehouse that can answer a current business question and expand its usefulness from there.
I talked about the need to get all data under management with the data warehouse being a key asset in this. I talked about the juxtaposition of the data warehouse with the data lake (and the lakehouse). I listed the valid data platforms for an enterprise and shared that, in my experience, enterprises have multiple data warehouses that have taken on more specific roles in the enterprise, like managing customer experience or asset maximization data. I stressed the idea that the data warehouse is a “shared” concept.
Ibrahim Surani, Astera CEO, and Mike O’Quinn, VP Product Management, introduced the audience to the latest addition to their product line, Astera DW Builder. They shared the vision and inspiration behind developing the product and what makes it different from other market players. In essence, it is a tool that automates most aspects of data warehouse development, integrates with the cloud, and anyone can use it without coding. Use cases it can handle include green field data warehouses/marts, cloud data warehouses, and legacy data warehouse modernization.
Jay Mishra, Astera COO, showed a demo of DW Builder. In 22 minutes, he was able to go through the complete steps to build a basic data warehouse:
• Pointed the tool at the source data
• Modeled it
• Modeled the destination as dimensional
• Published the 2 models and created the ELT load pipelines
• Did the data integration mapping
• Ran the job to populate facts and dimensions
• Viewed the data through dashboards in PowerBI
Astera is rapidly adding new connectors to DW Builder and continually focused on keeping the learning curve short. From building dimensional models and data vaults to executing complex dimensions and fact loading pipelines and even consuming data on BI tools via OData queries, everything can be done through the tool’s user interface.
