Set to reach an incredible $103 billion by 2023, the big data market is booming across the globe. As a leading industry in terms of investment and output, it’s no surprise that new tools are being created every day to push what is possible with data.
Considering that individuals generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day, businesses have had to rely on these emerging technologies to keep up with the rate of production.
Businesses can put data to work in a range of ways, with central data warehouses holding information that can help them boost returns, satisfy their customers, and effectively plan for the future.
Yet, considering the sheer amount of information that is continuously generated, businesses often have a hard time managing data effectively.
That’s where data warehouse and other data infrastructure come in, with these tools giving businesses a secure location to store all of their data.
As data management has become more complex, data engineers are now spending more time than ever maintaining their servers.
In this article, we’ll cover the X best ways of ensuring your data performs well, covering the best tips for managing your data warehouse effectively. Let’s get right into it.
Why Does Data Performance Matter?
Performance, mostly measured in terms of speed, is one of the core metrics that data engineers will continually try to improve.
While the clarity of data and its underlying structure will impact how quickly businesses can analyze it, nothing moves without a strong performance from the data itself.
In the fast-moving world of business, real-time analytics can provide a line of reasoning to follow. Instead of having to make impulsive decisions, data analytics from fast-flowing data provides an insight that is vital for success in business.
By harnessing the power of live data analytics, businesses can quickly respond to trends, analyze their own strategies, and create effective action plans for the future.
The ability to track everything, from the amount of time customers spend on certain pages to the exact return on certain campaigns, provides a solid basis for continued strategizing.
Beyond this, in the age of instant gratification, we are not used to waiting for anything. Taking the world of business as an example, the brand COOK reduced the average time it took to load each of their pages by 850 milliseconds.
This minute change led to a 7% decrease in bounce rate, 7% increase in sales conversions, and 10% more sessions per page overall.
Quite simply, without data performance, entire businesses can stagnate, reduce output, and fall behind competitors.
Increasing Data Performance Through Data Warehouse Optimization
As the central location where all of your company data, including externally and internally generated information, is stored, good management of data warehouses is vital for success.
Touching all data that comes in, managing it, and storing it, increasing the efficiency of a data warehouse will radically improve the performance of the data itself.
With this in mind, there are a range of ways that you can optimize your data warehouses, right down to a database level.
Each of these might have only a small effect on the response rate of your data. But, when attempted holistically, these small changes build up rapidly, creating a much more effective data system.
We recommend that you run database checks and optimize your query process.
Run Database Checks
While you can tinker with your database on an individual level, nothing will affect the overall speed of your data management than ensuring it has all the CPU, memory, and disk space it needs to run effectively.
Let’s address these in order:
- CPU – If you’re running on a cloud data warehouse, this won’t matter. If not, then you should make sure you upgrade your CPU unit as much as possible. The continuous load will strain a CPU, meaning the most powerful one available will best handle your operations.
- Memory – If your database doesn’t have enough memory, it will fail to run effectively. The more memory you allocate to a system, the more effective and faster it will run. If possible, increase the amount of memory you allocate to your databases.
- Disk Space – Disk space can become a fatal flaw in your data management system. While lots of disk space and not running a database on its own disk will avoid data fragmentation, it could also lead to over-consumption of resources. To create the best possible environment for database performance, you should use solid-state disks and choose an SSD model that is actually designed for your database.
These three pillars are the core of effective database management. Focusing on improving or honing each of these is one of the most effective ways of upgrading the total efficiency of your entire system.
Optimize the Query Process
As one of the primary methods of interacting with data within a data warehouse, querying is something that must be optimized above all else. Depending on which data warehouse provider you use, the natural speed of querying your data will change.
For example, when looking at a comparison between Apache Druid vs Snowflake, we can see that Snowflake offers a higher query concurrency throughout peak hours of operations.
One of the easiest ways of improving your querying process is to ensure your data warehouse is as effective as possible at managing different query systems. By moving to a provider that has a more comprehensive overview, you’ll be able to improve your query concurrence.
Alternatively, you can optimize your queries by using the correct coding practices. Often, developers will use subqueries as they are often much more convenient.
However, an overreliance on this format can slow down database speed significantly. Equally, any coding loops you’ve accidentally created could have a knock-on effect and create thousands of additional requests.
Over time, by streamlining your code, you’ll be able to improve the efficiency of your systems, optimizing your query process and in turn, your data management system.
Final Thoughts
The key to data performance is ensuring your data warehouse is effectively managed by your team of engineers. As an active system, management of these practices ensures that your data can quickly respond to queries.
Over time, the small changes you make to how you manage your data warehouse will lead to a big change in the overall response of your data.
Focusing on improving data integrity and response rate can lead to a business that puts data first. Using data-driven insights, your business will be able to effectively plan for the future, adapt to change, and create effective strategies going forward.
