WHAT DOES A DATA WAREHOUSE DO?

Published: Jun 19, 2025 - The Data Warehouse Professional designs and implements efficient data warehouse solutions that support enterprise-level decision-making. This role involves integrating diverse data sources into structured repositories using ETL pipelines and ensuring optimized data retrieval. This position also applies data modeling techniques and performance tuning strategies to enhance analytics accuracy and system reliability.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Data Warehouse

1. Data Warehouse Analyst Duties and Roles

  • Requirements Analysis: Creates requirements, business rules documents, data mappings, workflows, and ER diagrams for data warehouse loading and data transformation processes.
  • Documentation Support: Provides requirements, rules, data mappings, and diagrams to technical teams, including data warehouse and data integration developers.
  • Technical Guidance: Guides the technical teams on building solutions.
  • Data Analysis: Analyzes raw system data.
  • Error Analysis: Analyzes data integration errors and works with business and technical teams to provide solutions and improve data quality.
  • Source Identification: Works with technical teams to identify data sources to support reports and dashboard development.
  • Data Validation: Validates data warehouse structures and data to ensure accuracy.
  • Data Integrity: Ensures data joins and referential integrity are in place in data sets.
  • Reference Data Management: Ensures reference data is available and accessible for analytics.
  • Scope Identification: Identifies work efforts involved inside and outside of the scope of a data-centric project.

2. Data Warehouse Architect Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • Data Utilization: Understands how data is used to support analytical and/or operational reporting
  • User Requirements Gathering: Interviews business users to obtain requirements for enhancements and/or new analytic assets
  • Data Mapping: Maps source system data to data warehouse models
  • Training Documentation: Assists in the development of data asset training and documentation
  • Data Integration: Works with teams to integrate data across clinical, administrative, and financial source systems, including the management of critical master data
  • ETL Development: Develops and tests extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) processes
  • Process Standards Compliance: Follows standards for technology and technical processes
  • Solution Presentation: Presents technical solutions to stakeholders and end users

3. Data Warehouse Developer Job Description

  • Database Analysis: Analyze and understand complex databases and AGF’s systems of data.
  • Data Modeling: Design and implement logical and physical data models and solutions to support reporting systems and analysis.
  • ETL Development: Develop data integration and ETL solutions between various databases and business systems.
  • Database Maintenance: Maintain and enhance database views, functions, and stored procedures used in the enterprise data warehouse and other reporting databases.
  • Performance Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot issues with database views and query performance.
  • ETL Support: Operational support and troubleshooting of data integration and ETL processes.
  • Best Practices Advisory: Provide experienced guidance and recommendations on data modeling, integration, and analysis best practices.
  • Technology Improvement: Contribute to ongoing technology improvement through understanding clients’ needs and AGF’s data and systems needed to build reports and information delivery solutions.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with other teams and departments to ensure excellent levels of client service.

4. Data Warehouse Engineer Roles and Details

  • Schema Design: Design and implement a product cloud data warehouse schema for multiple stages of data.
  • Data Handling: Handle large sets of data from various data sources.
  • Infrastructure Collaboration: Work closely with data engineers to build cloud data infrastructure to support business needs.
  • Data Modeling: Model the data and design ETL specifications to business requirements.
  • Data Delivery: Deliver the data to the API components.
  • Warehouse Maintenance: Perform data warehouse maintenance and upgrades.
  • Data Security: Develop data security inside data warehouses.
  • Script Development: Code or test scripts that complete activities such as data cleanup, repairs, synchronization, and integration.
  • Performance Optimization: Consistently give technical proposals to optimize data warehouse capacity, scalability, and performance.
  • Documentation: Establish the documentation of reports, develops, and maintains technical specification documentation for all reports and processes.

5. Data Warehouse Manager Essential Functions

  • Platform Development: Design, develop, and support the data warehouse platform and enterprise reporting solutions using Microsoft SQL Server Stack in MS Azure.
  • ETL Implementation: Design and implement ETL procedures for the intake of data from both internal and outside sources, as well as ensure data is verified and quality is checked.
  • Team Leadership: Provide management and leadership to a team of data warehouse developers and architects.
  • BI Collaboration: Partner closely with and support the Business Intelligence team, which is responsible for visualizing the data architected in the data warehouse into dashboards.
  • User Engagement: Build and manage relationships with end users and operational leaders to understand workflows and how the data warehouse can be designed to support their reporting needs.
  • Enhancement Planning: Collaborate with operations leadership to identify and prioritize opportunities for data warehouse enhancements and workflow optimization.
  • System Configuration: Research, execute, and build the necessary system setup/changes to successfully achieve desired project outcomes.
  • Specification Development: Provide detailed specifications for proposed development solutions, including technical requirements and the scope involved.
  • Solution Demonstration: Assist in creating practical demonstrations of proposed solutions and demonstrating them to other members of the team.