Every day, businesses generate tons of information: transactions, customer behavior, reports, logs, dashboards, API queries, CRM data. All of this is potentially valuable insights but only if there’s a system that can combine, structure, and make it convenient for analysis.
Today’s data storage tools are cloud platforms that work on speed, scalability, integration with BI systems, reporting automation, and the ability to extract valuable insights in seconds.
From small e-commerce to large fintechs, everyone who works with data sooner or later reaches a point where Google Sheets can no longer process all the data. And without the right data warehousing tool, there will be no further growth.
In this article by DATAFOREST, we will cover:
– Why does a business need a data warehouse at all;
– How to choose the right tool (and not overpay);
– What are the specific benefits of professional DWH platforms;
– Which services are in the top 15 today—from giants to niche tools.
If you work with analytics, BI systems, CRMs, or simply want to organize your data—this article will save you dozens of hours of research. Arrange a call with our team to learn about big data management.
Why Businesses Need Data Warehousing Tools
Modern businesses run on data. But data itself is just raw material. If there is no place where it is stored, updated, and analyzed, you can’t make data-driven decisions and use all the insights effectively.
Here are some reasons why companies are switching to modern data warehousing platforms:
- Data from different sources is scattered and not synchronized. CRM, marketing, finance, web analytics—each department pulls data in its own direction. Data warehouse technologies allow you to store everything in one place.
- Lots of time spent on manual analysis and report preparation. Instead of manually compiling reports, analysts can focus on insights and strategies if the data is already structured.
- Need for scalability. With each new product or market, the amount of data grows.
- Real risk of errors. Data without a single system can lead to errors, duplication, conflicts and chaos. One wrong number or KPI—and the whole strategy has gone the wrong way.
- Data-driven decision-making. In an era where competitive advantage is determined by seconds, access to quality analytics is not an option, but a necessity.
What to Pay Attention to When Choosing the Best Data Warehousing Tool?
Data warehousing is a comprehensive method for collecting, managing, and analyzing large amounts of data in order to gain insights into your business and make informed decisions. Using the correct data warehousing tool, you can achieve greater efficiency, reduce costs, and drive success. If you want to always be on the cutting edge of technology, book a call.
Many data warehousing tools are available today, but choosing the right one for your business can take time and effort. This bullet list highlights key factors you should consider and describes how to proceed.
- Scalability: When choosing a data warehousing tool, one of the most important factors to consider is its ability to scale. Your tool needs to be able to handle large amounts of both storage and processing at once.
- Performance optimization: A good data warehousing tool should provide fast, efficient data processing—and, if necessary, real-time data analysis of that processed information.
- Security: For data warehousing, security is everything. Therefore, choose a tool that provides ample safeguards for your needs.
- Ease of Use: Data warehousing is a challenging and time-consuming process that takes years to master, but you still need an easy way for all your team members—experts or not—to navigate the data.
- Integration: Your data warehousing tool should be compatible with the other systems that your organization uses.
- Cost: Consider the cost of the tool and its long-term utility to help you decide if it is worth purchasing.
To select the best data warehousing tool for your organization, follow these simple steps:
- Assess your data needs.
- Shortlist vendors.
- Compare products.
- Test the tools.
- Make a budget-friendly choice that meets scalability, performance, and security goals.
But DATAFOREST did that for you!
Let's explore the most incredible data warehousing tools and their benefits.
Benefits of Using Professional Data Warehousing Services
Imagine two scenarios. In the first, you build your own data infrastructure: configure servers, write ETL pipelines, and deal with performance drops during peak load. In the second, you use a cloud service where scaling, security, backup, and query optimization are already configured. Guess which scenario allows your business to grow faster?
Professional data warehouse software has become a strategic advantage for your businesses. And here's why:
Quick start without extra costs
There's no need to build infrastructure from scratch. You immediately get a working solution ready for integration.
Scalability
More data is not a problem. Cloud services automatically adjust to the load, without manual intervention.
Analytics optimization
Professional platforms are designed for analytical queries: complex joins, aggregations, dashboards—everything is processed quickly.
Enterprise-level security
Certifications, encryption, access control—services take care of data security better than any internal IT department in a medium-sized business.
Routine tasks automation, more focus on business
No need to think about backups, updates, logging or server support. The team is engaged in analytics, not technical maintenance.
Regular updates and innovations.
Cloud platforms are constantly evolving, adding new features and optimizations that you automatically receive.
Types of Data Warehouse Tools
Let’s review the main types of data warehousing tools that businesses are using:
- Cloud DWH platforms. You can scale as needed and easily integrate them with other services (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
- On-premise solutions. Suitable if you need full control and a specific architecture (such as Vertica or older versions of Teradata).
- Hybrid tools. They combine cloud and on-premises resources to provide flexibility and compliance with security policies.
- NoSQL storage. For unstructured or semi-structured data, when classic tables are not an option (Amazon DynamoDB or MarkLogic).
Top-15 Best Data Warehousing Tools & Resources
This section has compiled a list of the top 15 data warehousing tools and resources that can help you collect, manage and maintain your organization's data better. From commercial to open-source software, this guide includes tools for data extraction, cleaning, modeling, analysis, and reporting.
Read on to learn more about these tools, their key features, and prices!
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a cloud-based data warehousing software that makes it easy for users to access and analyze large amounts of data using standard SQL. With features such as no upfront costs for installation, automated administrative tasks, and enhanced reliability through climate-controlled data centers, it is an easy-to-manage and scalable database.
Amazon Redshift supports cloud data warehousing tools like Amazon S3, which complies with various industry standards for security. This tool provides easy analytics and scalable storage solutions. It supports ten data sources and integrates with PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MySQL databases.
Amazon Redshift can export data warehouse reports in a variety of output formats. It is also available as a cloud-based platform, allowing users to access it from anywhere. However, it is a single-cloud solution and requires a good understanding of its sort and list keys. Amazon Redshift is a great data warehousing tool that offers advanced features and excellent support at a competitive price.
Pricing: Submit a Quote Request to Sales, 60 Days Free Test.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is an all-inclusive cloud platform renowned for its versatility, employing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) to cater to diverse computing needs. Azure's cross-connections feature is one of its outstanding strengths, providing Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), Caches, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and ExpressRoute connections that ensure seamless connections between different networks and locations, both on-premises or in the public cloud. Better still, Microsoft Azure prioritizes data security and adopts robust physical infrastructure and operational security measures to offer a safe data environment.
Microsoft Azure is an efficient platform for running virtual machines or containers, equipped with real-time functionalities and rapid provisioning capabilities. Additionally, Azure App Service provides an all-inclusive web hosting service that enables the creation of web applications, services, and Restful APIs, irrespective of the hosting plan required. This allows developers to focus on application development and programming tasks without having to manage servers. Regarding data warehousing, Azure provides excellent tools and technologies for reporting, testing, and warehousing. There are also open-source data warehousing tools available for users.
Pricing: The price for serverless computing on Azure SQL database starts at $0.52 per V-core/hour. Here, V-core is one hyper-thread. Azure Serverless Compute runs on Gen 5 logical CPUs (with a max of 256). Storage cost in Azure is $0.115 per GB/hour (minimum of 5GB) with additional charges for backup storage at $0.20 per GB/month—the most you can store on this plan is 4TB total between backups and active data stores.
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery is one of the best cloud-based data warehousing tools available, allowing users to analyze vast amounts of data scalable and cost-effectively. It's a Platform as a Service that uses ANSI SQL for querying and has built-in capabilities for machine learning. The combination of column storage and NoSQL features makes this an excellent option for data analysts conducting large-scale machine learning or data mining.
Compared to other data warehousing tools, BigQuery is cost-effective and offers auto-scaling services that enable the creation of a data lake that can be integrated with existing applications, skills, and IT investments. Unlike traditional databases, which rely on SQL command structures to retrieve data from tables and files, NoSQL is optimized for running analytical queries using a subset of SQL-lite syntax. Its focus on large datasets makes it particularly well suited for Internet companies such as Facebook or Amazon—wherein users regularly generate billions of rows worth of information each day by interacting with other users' posts or ordering products online.
BigQuery's query execution time is minimal, ensuring quick data analysis. Most of the initialization time in BigQuery is spent on preparing the query—not running it—so that anyone with access to a browser can run complex queries without having to be an expert programmer or buying expensive software licenses.
Pricing: Basic Plan Free.
Snowflake
Snowflake is an innovative cloud-based data warehousing solution offering top-of-the-line data warehousing tools. Significant infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure support it. Snowflake gives users complete control over their data processing efforts by enabling them to scale storage and computation independently. They can pay only for what they use—and blend, analyze, or transform their data using a familiar SQL interface. One of the most exciting features of Snowflake is its dynamic computing power, which scales automatically based on usage. Storage and computation are separate, allowing users to only pay for the storage they need. This streamlined approach sets it apart from similar services like Amazon's Redshift Spectrum, which aren't relatively as seamless.
Snowflake makes it easy to clone tables, schemas, and databases without duplicating data by using pointers rather than copying the data to existing information. This feature helps make processing more efficient and saves time and resources.
Snowflake is one of the best data warehousing tools available today. Its innovative features include cloud-based Infrastructure and independent scaling, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes—regardless of their complex data processing and reporting needs.
Pricing: Snowflake's pricing is based on per-second charging, whereas other data warehousing technologies typically charge you according to the volume of data processed.
The cost of running Snowflake on Amazon Web Services is calculated in real-time by the second. But users can also opt for a minimum charge of 60 seconds, depending on their country and chosen pricing tier (Standard, Enterprise Business Critical).
The Standard tier's average compute costs at $0.00056 per second and per credit, while the Enterprise tier's equivalent rate is higher—at $0.0011 per second and each credit used.
Micro Focus Vertica
Micro Focus Vertica is a highly regarded data warehousing tool with an advanced in-database analytics engine that can handle big data workloads. With its flexibility, scalability, and ability to handle a wide range of data-related needs, it is considered one of the best ways for businesses to store their information.
Vertica is widely known for its advanced internal analytics capabilities that allow it to improve query performance. Unlike traditional relational databases and open-source alternatives, Vertica can scale as demand grows or spiking volumes hit—and still remain fast enough to meet SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
Although Vertica is a column-oriented relational database, it's still well suited for predictive maintenance and analysis tasks due to its easy handling of vast amounts of data.
Overall, Micro Focus Vertica offers an efficient and highly effective tool for businesses of all sizes looking to manage and analyze their data effectively. Its robust capabilities, speed, simplicity, and openness make it one of the top data warehousing tools available today.
Pricing: Vertica provides three nodes and up to 1 TB of storage with its free community tier. Customers are billed per hour for the use of the subscription cloud tier. Computing costs vary by area and fulfillment choice—such as a 64-bit Amazon Machine Image; starting rate is $2 per hour.
Teradata
As one of the top data warehousing tools available today, Teradata boasts a powerful Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that ensures fast and reliable large-scale data processing.
With its data integration and ETL capabilities, Teradata simplifies data warehousing tasks, making it the ideal choice for businesses of all sizes. Its user-friendly interface and suitability for OLAP also make it accessible to business users with minimal query knowledge. While Teradata architecture may not be the best fit for big data processing, it remains the best contender for anyone seeking efficient and robust data warehousing tools.
Pricing: Teradata follows a pay-as-you-go model, but pricing information is unavailable.
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is the NoSQL data warehouse service offered by AWS and provides a flexible approach to storing and managing data on Amazon's cloud. DynamoDB supports both key-value and document data structures—and has high availability, reliability, and scalability with absolutely no limits to your dataset size or request output.
Because DynamoDB supports both high-speed data access and big analytical queries, it's the perfect solution for any OLAP workload.
Regarding data warehousing, Amazon DynamoDB offers a robust and scalable solution ideal for high-speed access to large datasets.
Pricing: DynamoDB offers two pricing options: on-demand and provisioned capacity. The free tier includes 25GB of storage and 2.5 million stream read queries per month—enough to support the products many startups want to launch without paying anything upfront.
DynamoDB charges $0.25 per million reads and writes plus $0.25 per GB of data stored in its database.
For users with unpredictable traffic, provisioned-capacity pricing is recommended. This model allows you to scale the demand up or down automatically and uses flexible hourly rates based on your read/write provisions.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is considered one of the best open-source data warehousing tools and technologies available for organizations. With features like foreign keys, subqueries—even user-defined types and functions!—it's a popular choice for complex applications that demand high performance from their database systems. In contrast to SQL Server and MySQL, PostgreSQL is a more feature-rich system that can deliver high performance in data warehousing. PostgreSQL is designed to handle large volumes of data and complex queries.
PostgreSQL is a versatile and robust data warehousing tool that can be utilized for various use cases. As such, it's an excellent choice for organizations seeking reliable, scalable solutions—particularly those with large or complex datasets.
Pricing: It is free open-source software that can be downloaded.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is an excellent option for data warehousing tools and technologies, enabling users to quickly operate and scale relational databases within the AWS ecosystem. As a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, RDS abstracts much of the infrastructure complexity from the user, making it one of the best data warehousing tools on the market. It provides three instance classes - Standard, Memory Optimized, and Burstable performance, each tailored to meet different user needs with respect to CPU capacity, memory size, storage volumes, and network I/O performance.
With support for six database engines, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server, RDS makes it easy to deploy scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available database clusters. RDS is a cost-effective solution for data warehousing, providing features such as replication for high availability and backups for disaster recovery. Whether you need to run a modern web application, a critical enterprise data system, or a mobile app backend, RDS can give you the power and agility you need to succeed with your data warehousing tools.
Pricing: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, for instance, offers users one or many deployments of reserved or on-demand instances with hourly billing. For example, the compute cost for a single instance in Amazon's On-Demand pricing tier is currently $4.27 per hour. For a one-year contract, the equivalent rate in the reserved-instance tier is $2.73 per hour—a savings of 60 percent compared to on-demand pricing for that same time period. Storage costs across all database engines are roughly $0.1117 per GB/instance.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is a popular cloud storage solution for businesses with large amounts of data that need to be stored. It's a reliable and accessible storage option that offers outstanding durability, excellent performance, unparalleled scalability, and maximum security at affordable prices.S3 uses a key-value store, making it an excellent option for storing unstructured or semi-structured data. It offers a variety of features, such as support for metadata, custom prefixes, and object tags, that enable you to customize the service to meet your specific needs.
With Amazon S3, you can store items up to 5TB in size (for example, a large number of images or videos) and upload files of more than 5GB in one go—allowing for quick storage, access, and downloading. Additionally, each object has its unique URL, making download access simple.)
Compared to DynamoDB, S3 offers unlimited storage at lower costs but has slower scan operations. However, it does perform HTTP queries—meaning that you can use Amazon's web services tools for a range of applications that require cloud-based data sources and processing power.
Overall, Amazon S3 is a powerful cloud storage service that provides businesses of all sizes with the necessary tools to meet their storage needs.
Pricing: Amazon S3 has different storage costs depending on the storage class. Seven storage classes are available to users, starting with Standard. A single gigabyte of storage costs a flat $1 per month, regardless of how much data you store. If you use 50 TB in Standard class, the charge is $0.023/GB/month.
SAP HANA
SAP HANA is a powerful and versatile data warehousing tool offering a wide range of data management, reporting, and analytics features. SAP HANA is an excellent platform for aggregating and analyzing data from different SAP applications into a unified format, providing a detailed view of enterprise operations. SAP HANA's intuitive user interface and pre-built analysis tools allow IT and business users to obtain valuable insights from large amounts of data quickly. Moreover, SAP HANA provides data security and governance tools that ensure your business information is safe.
SAP HANA is a powerful platform for unified data management and advanced decision-making. It supports the creation of robust, scalable solutions for data warehousing testing—and enjoys widespread adoption by organizations across industries due to its ease of use and superior performance compared with traditional alternatives. It offers data warehousing testing tools customized to suit company needs.
Pricing: Begin at $19 per month.
MarkLogic
MarkLogic is a platform for building robust, scalable applications. MarkLogic combines the strengths of relational databases, NoSQL databases, and search engines to create a powerful hybrid solution.
If you want to do real-time analytics on large data sets, MarkLogic's operational data warehouse is the right tool. MarkLogic Data Hub makes setting up a central repository that can connect with your current database structure easily.
That's why they also offer reporting and testing tools—so you can reap the rewards of full automation without having to worry about how it works. And best of all, once you've installed their software on your computer, there are no further costs: just easy use!
That's why they also offer reporting and testing tools—so you can reap the rewards of full automation without worrying about how it works. And best of all, once you've installed their software on your computer, there are no further costs: just easy use!
Pricing: Fixed low priority tier: This tier's compute cost is $0.074 per hour/MCU, and storage fees are $0.10 per GB; users can adjust demand using standard on-demand prices.
Users who anticipate a set traffic volume can reserve compute resources for an entire year under the standard reserved option.
MariaDB
MariaDB Server is a popular, open-source database that the original developers of MySQL created. It has advanced storage engines and seamlessly interfaces with other RDBMS data sources. MariaDB database management system follows the client/server model. It means that the server program can be remotely located from its clients, and MariaDB's impressive speed makes it faster than MySQL. MariaDB's memory storage engine executes data manipulation statements more quickly than the standard MySQL engine. It offers versatile commands and interfaces accessible to NoSQL users; this makes processes smoother for everyone.
Pricing: The price of MariaDB Cloud starts at $0.45 per hour for the Foundation tier. The company does not disclose its pricing mechanism in detail.
Db2 Warehouse
IBM Db2 Warehouse is an elastic cloud data warehouse solution offering autonomous processing and data storage scaling.
One of the key features of IBM Db2 is its ability to efficiently store, analyze, and retrieve data. With in-memory processing and highly optimized column data storage, it supports increased analytics and machine learning workloads. Its compatibility with Oracle PL/SQL also makes it a well-designed, fully managed Cloud SQL Database-as-a-Service solution.
IBM Db2 is a highly reliable and potent Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) designed to store, analyze, and retrieve data effectively. It has a clear, simple, and user-friendly user interface (UI) and data migration procedures that are easy for users of all skill levels.
As data management needs continue to evolve, IBM Db2 is quickly evolving into the AI database. Its modernization of AI development and facilitation of the administration of structured and unstructured data across physical platforms and multi-cloud settings make it an excellent choice for businesses looking to fuel today's cognitive applications.
Pricing: Users of Db2 Warehouse have access to 9 price tiers. The lowest tier, Flex One, offers users a single-partitioned instance. It is perfect for businesses that are beginning a data warehouse project. This tier's compute cost is $0.68 per instance/hour.
Cloudera
The Cloudera Data Warehousing Platform is a powerful platform for data warehousing that eliminates silos and accelerates the discovery of data-driven insights. The Platform applies consistent security, governance, and metadata across shared data environments to ensure that business users can explore and work on data quickly without assistance from IT.
By consolidating data marts into a scalable analytics platform, IT can eliminate inefficiencies caused by data silos, thereby meeting business needs more effectively. Additionally, the open design of the Platform allows data to be accessed by more users with more tools, including data scientists and engineers, providing more value at a lower cost.
Besides, Cloudera also offers a modern enterprise platform, tools, and expertise to unlock business understanding with machine learning and AI. Optimized for the cloud, this modern machine learning and analytics platform can help build and deploy AI solutions at scale, efficiently, and securely anywhere desired. Cloudera Quick Forward Labs provides expert guidance to help discover and plan for an AI future more quickly.
Overall, Cloudera offers a robust and efficient solution for organizations looking to develop their data warehousing and machine learning capabilities.
Pricing: The Cloudera data warehouse charges by the hour. The price per instance is $0.72 per hour.
How to Choose the Best Data Warehouse Tool for Your Business?
There is no universal solution. What works perfectly for a startup may not be suitable for enterprises. Therefore, before choosing a tool, you should answer a few questions:
- What volumes of data do you process now and expect in the future?
- Do you need a cloud, on-premise data storage solution, or something hybrid?
- Who is on your team: do you have tech specialists and engineers, or do you need something as simple as possible?
- Is integration with BI systems, CRM or other data sources important?
And most importantly - the best solution is one that solves your problems here and now, but does not limit your company’s growth.
Data Warehousing Tools: Comparison Table
Seamless Data Management with DATAFOREST
As a tech vendor, DATAFOREST can help you ensure seamless data management. Our approach combines AI, analytics, engineering, and business logic to build data solutions for specific tasks. We help companies:
- unify data from dozens of sources (CRM, ERP, web analytics, API);
- set up automatic data cleansing, structuring, and enrichment;
- implement scalable cloud DWH solutions;
- create reporting and dashboards that speak the language of business.
One example is this case: a digital marketing agency stored a lot of valuable data in a way that was hard to analyze. The client wanted to collect all data in one place, update it daily, and aggregate it in a way that is easy to use for visualization and reporting.
Streamlined Data Analytics
Their communication was great, and their ability to work within our time zone was very much appreciated.
DATAFOREST helped achieve a streamlined data integration process that allows for efficient data collection, transformation, and analysis by combining data warehousing, ETL tools, and APIs. We built a data warehouse that serves as a central repository for all of their data, allowing for easy access and analysis.
To extract and transform data from various sources, ETL tools were used. These tools helped to automate the process of collecting data, ensuring that the data is clean, consistent, and transformed into the required format.
APIs were utilized to connect to the client's existing systems and extract data in real-time, providing up-to-date information that can be useful for reporting and visualization purposes.
Do you have a similar challenge or are you just curious about what can be optimized in your data management system? Fill out a short form, and we will contact you to discuss data warehousing solution options specifically for you. Our goal is to make data work for your business.
FAQ
What are the main differences between cloud-based and on-premises data warehouses?
Cloud solutions are faster to deploy, can scale as needed, and usually have a pay-as-you-go pricing model. On-premises solutions require their own infrastructure and more resources to support, but give you full control over your data.
What is the role of machine learning in data warehousing solutions?
Machine learning helps optimize queries, build predictions, and automate analytical processes directly in the cloud.
Can data warehousing tools integrate with other business intelligence (BI) tools?
Yes, most tools support integration with Power BI, Looker, Tableau, and others via connectors or APIs.
What are the cost implications of using data warehousing tools for small businesses?
Cloud DWHs have affordable pricing. You can start with a free tier and then pay for actual usage. On-premises are more expensive due to the need for equipment and technical staff.
Are there data warehousing solutions specifically designed for industries like healthcare and finance?
Yes, some services have specialized versions that take into account industry standards, data compliance and regulations, certifications, and security requirements, such as for healthcare or financial institutions.
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