Cloud data warehouse solutions | 2024 guide

What is Cloud Warehousing?

At its core, a cloud data warehouse is a database stored as a managed service in a public cloud, specifically optimized for scalable business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Unlike a traditional on-premises data warehouse constrained by physical data centers, cloud warehouses leverage the cloud's dynamic nature, enabling businesses to adjust their data storage and processing capabilities on the fly.

The Cloud allows for dynamic scaling to meet changing business budgets and requirements.

These data warehouses store information and data across diverse sources like IoT, CRM, finance systems, providing a unified and structured dataset ready for various BI and analytics use cases.

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Understanding Cloud Solutions

Data cloud solutions represent a paradigm shift in how organizations approach analytics and reporting. By leveraging the cloud for data storage and processing, businesses gain the ability to handle explosive data growth and adapt to end-users' evolving needs more efficiently.

Why It Matters:

• Flexibility: Cloud data solutions free businesses from physical constraints, allowing them to grow or shrink their data based on changing needs.
• Structured Data for Analytics: Cloud-based data warehouses provide highly structured and unified data, supporting a wide range of specific BI and analytics use cases.

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Choosing the Best Cloud Data Warehouse

With various services available in the market, choosing the right one for your business is a critical decision. Let's explore some key factors to consider and take a brief look at popular cloud data warehouses.

Key Considerations:

• Performance: Evaluate the performance of the solution, considering factors like processing speed and efficiency.
• Scalability: Look for a solution that offers scalability to accommodate your growing data needs.
• Integration: Consider the availability of integrations with other tools and platforms crucial for your business processes.

Popular Cloud Data Warehouses:

1. Amazon Redshift: Known as the first widely adopted cloud data warehouse, Amazon Redshift provides petabyte-scale data lake in the cloud. Its SQL dialect is based on PostgreSQL, ensuring familiarity for analysts worldwide.
2. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics: Combining enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics, Azure Synapse Analytics offers a unified experience for ingesting, preparing, managing, and serving data for BI and machine learning needs.
3. Google BigQuery: As a fully managed, serverless data warehouse, BigQuery automatically scales to match storage and computing power needs. It offers columnar and ANSI SQL databases, making it efficient for analyzing terabytes to petabytes of data.
4. Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse: Setting itself apart, Snowflake is a fully managed multi-cloud data warehouse, running on AWS, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and Azure. Its interchangeable code base and global data replication make it a unique solution for high concurrency and data mobility.

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Data Warehouse Solutions: An Overview

Data warehouse services go beyond traditional databases, catering to the complexities of modern data requirements.

Differentiation:

• Structure and Purpose: Data warehouse architecture are designed for specific analytics and reporting needs, providing a structured approach to handle diverse data sources.
• Scalability and Performance: These solutions often leverage massively parallel processing (MPP) and columnar data stores for high-performance queries on large data volumes.

Particularly, in startups or a small business, data matters even more. It's vital. It's the edge that allows them to go faster than giant enterprises. They need to make decisions faster, use data and gain a complete overview of their business performance. The issue is that often big data architecture are complex to set up, require specific skills in the team, such as data scientists or data architecture experts, and additionally, take time to deploy.

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ETL vs Data warehouse

ETL or ELT stands for Extract, Transform, Load. ETL is a process thath allows to integrate data from multiple sources into a central repository (a warehouse). Basically, ETL is like a data mixing bowl, where we combine data from lots of different places into one big pot. Then, data warehousing is like finding a good place to store and organize all that data so we can easily use it and study it. Dokin is an ETL solution that allows you to build a lightweight data warehouse in Google Sheets.

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Dokin: A lightweight Solution for Small Businesses

Dokin offers a modern solution, ideally conceived for small businesses, that allows them to connect data from disparate data sources in Google Sheets. Dokin is a no-code ETL solution, no query data knowledge is necessary. Users can pull live data directly from sources like HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Notion, Airtable, Google Ads and other marketing channels, SQL bases and more data type into their spreadsheets. Data stays synced between the application and the spreadsheet. For some integrations like HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, Trello and Retable, Dokin also offers a Reverse ETL feature. Thus, users can pull live data from the source app into Sheets, make edits, add new records and load data back into the data source. This allows them to manage large amounts of data across platforms in a simple click.

Key Features of Dokin:

• No-Code Interface: Dokin's no-code approach makes it accessible for users without extensive technical expertise, empowering small businesses to manage their data effectively.
• Built-In Integrations: With pre-built integrations with leading platforms and dashboard templates, Dokin is an ideal solution for data analysis in Marketing team, Sales and BI.
• Data is stored by the user, not Dokin: a great advantage of a solution like Dokin, is data protection. Dokin doesn't store data from the user. Being a spreadsheet-integrated platform, data is directly stored in the users' Google Drive and Google Cloud storage

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Use cases for Dokin

Dokin is the modern cloud data warehouse for agencies, small businesses and early-stage startups, aimed at marketers, sales, and operations. Dokin helps consolidate and analyze data from different sources to evaluate the efficiency of go-to-market initiatives.  

Dokin users report, amongst its main advantages, being able to manage large sets of different type of data using the simplicity of spreadsheets.

"We mainly use it to connect analytics and search console. It was a game changer for us. It improves our reporting capacities and finally allows us to manage large parts of our business from google sheets.
On top, their support is incredible."

Christian P, Marketing Director, BCN Travels

"Dokin has made a priceless difference to the integration and automation to process data across multiple platforms, allowing us to seamlessly handle and update informatinon across Google Sheets, Slides, HubSpot CRM, and Google Analytics 4. The platform is incredibly user friendly, it is 'plug and play' and quick and easy to build highly customisable reports. This is a superb product and adds differential value, at an extremely compelling price point - can't recommend it enough."

Kevin S., COO, Willo Video

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Why Dokin Stands Out

Dokin works in a completely different way than other solutions that require data engineering capabilities to work with unstructured data. If you are a marketer, sales or operations manager you can easily manage your data across your business platforms (CRMs, Marketing channels and SQL bases).

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Dokin vs. Competitors

Unlike traditional cloud data warehouse vendors like Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Azure SQL data warehouse, Dokin is an ETL solution. ETL is a process used for integrating data from multiple sources into a central repository, while data warehousing is the process of storing and managing this data in a way that makes it easy to access and analyze. Dokin is an ideal solution for small businesses, startups and agencies looking for a data integration solution.

1. Lightweight and User-Friendly:

• No-Code Solution: Dokin's no-code approach makes it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Quick Implementation: Small businesses can swiftly implement Dokin without the need for extensive training or IT support.

2. Cost-Efficient Data Management:

• Reduced Operational Costs: Unlike on-premises solutions, Dokin eliminates the need for dedicated server rooms and expensive hardware.
• Scalability: Dokin offers immediate and nearly unlimited storage, allowing businesses to scale without significant upfront costs.

3. Integration Flexibility:

• Extensive Integrations: Dokin's compatibility with a range of platforms ensures seamless data connectivity across diverse business tools.
• Adaptability: Small businesses can integrate Dokin into their existing workflow, enhancing overall efficiency without disrupting established processes.

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Cloud Data Warehouse Automation with Dokin

Dokin accelerates the availability of analytics-ready data. Dokin does the work that a data team would do for you. It allows marketers, sales and operations teams to access easily live data with all their business platforms within the ease of a spreadsheet.

Real-time Data Ingestion: Dokin supports continuous ingestion of enterprise data into popular cloud-based data warehouses in real time.

Automated Workflow: A model-driven approach refines data warehouse operations, ensuring efficiency and adaptability.

Enterprise-Ready Data: Dokin provides a smart, enterprise-scale data catalog, securely sharing data marts across the organization. The API connection offered by Dokin allows data loading and exporting between Sheets and other business apps, making your spreadsheet a powerful and dynamic tool for transforming and managing large data sets.

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Conclusion

Data management is a fundamental part of your go-to-market and operational strategy as a business. If you are a small business, marketing agency or a startup, check out how Dokin. Dokin is an ETL solution that allows you to build a lightweight data warehouse in Google Sheets. With a no-code interface, streamlined automation, and integration flexibility, it provides an efficient and cost-effective way to manage and report data.

Getting started with Dokin it's easy and free, as we offer a 15-day Free Trial (no credit card required). After that you can decide whether to start paying or move to our free plan.