O’Reilly Research on Integrating Data for Better Analytics

Sponsored By: Looker

Companies are collecting more data than ever. But, given how difficult it is to unify the many internal and external data streams they’ve built, more data doesn’t necessarily translate into better analytics. The real challenge is to provide deep and broad access to “a single source of truth” in their data that the typically slow ETL process for data warehousing cannot achieve. More than just fast access, analysts need the ability to explore data at a granular level.

This O'Reilly Media report provides a roadmap for how to connect systems, data stores, and institutions. 

- Identify stakeholders: build a culture of trust and awareness among decision makers, data analysts, and quality management

- Create a data plan: define your needs, specify your metrics, identify data sources, and standardize metric definitions 

- Centralize the data: evaluate each data source for existing common fields and, if you can, minor variances, and standardize data references

- Find the right tool(s) for the job: choose from legacy architecture tools, managed and cloud-only services, and data visualization or data exploration platforms