Selecting a Data Warehouse Provider: A Daunting Task

João Ferreira, Nuno Lourenço, João R. Campos

2025

Abstract

In the contemporary landscape of rapid data accumulation, organizations increasingly rely on data warehouses to process and store vast datasets efficiently. Although the most challenging task is appropriately designing a data warehouse, selecting a provider is far from the trivial task it should be. Each provider offers a distinct array of services, each with its pricing model, which requires significant effort to analyze and determine which configuration meets the specific needs of the organization. In this paper, we highlight the inherent challenges of making fair comparisons among data warehouse solutions, providing the context of a start-up in the space traffic management industry as a case study. We defined several critical attributes for corporate decision-making: cost, processing capabilities, and data storage capacity. We systematically compare four leading technologies: Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, and Snowflake. Our methodology employs a set of metrics designed to assess warehouse solutions, encompassing storage pricing, processing capabilities, scalability, and the integration of ETL tools. The process and the results highlight the challenges of this evaluation. It underscores the need for a standard approach to characterize the provided service specifications and pricing to allow for a fair and systematic assessment and comparison of alternative solutions.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ferreira J., Lourenço N. and Campos J. (2025). Selecting a Data Warehouse Provider: A Daunting Task. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA; ISBN 978-989-758-758-0, SciTePress, pages 552-559. DOI: 10.5220/0013568700003967

in Bibtex Style

@conference{data25,
author={João Ferreira and Nuno Lourenço and João Campos},
title={Selecting a Data Warehouse Provider: A Daunting Task},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA},
year={2025},
pages={552-559},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013568700003967},
isbn={978-989-758-758-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA
TI - Selecting a Data Warehouse Provider: A Daunting Task
SN - 978-989-758-758-0
AU - Ferreira J.
AU - Lourenço N.
AU - Campos J.
PY - 2025
SP - 552
EP - 559
DO - 10.5220/0013568700003967
PB - SciTePress