ON-SITE OR IN THE CLOUD?

A few years ago banks would never have dreamt about using the cloud for their data warehouse and user data marts and continued to spend vast sums of money on expensive hardware and software solutions that required constant expansion because of the growing amount of data being collected, processed, stored and used.

Data warehouses, data lakes and data marts can now be set up in the bank’s own data centre or in a cloud environment.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

Access to the data warehouse or data lake is handled through a layer specific software product that uses SQL language, which is a standard programming language used to manage and perform operations on relational databases. SQL was created in the 1970s and is used not only by database administrators, but by developers writing data integration scripts and analysts setting up and running analytical queries or data extracts.

Uses of SQL include changing database tables and index structures that organise them; adding, updating, and deleting rows of data; retrieving subsets of information from within a database for transaction processing and analytics applications. SQL operations take the form of commands written as statements such as ‘select’, ‘add’, ‘insert’, ‘update’, ‘delete’, ‘create’, ‘alter’ and ‘truncate’.