Data warehouse consulting
Data warehouse consulting that ends with your team owning it
Two people pull the same number and get two answers. Month-end close runs through a spreadsheet one person understands. Somebody has already tried to fix this once, and the half-built version is still sitting there.
Whether hiring someone fixes that is a separate question, and it turns on a few things you can check before anyone quotes you.
5 years
Building analytics that runs in production
10+ years
Minimum experience, every consultant on your project
What data warehouse consulting buys you
You are hiring a team to design and build the central store your reporting runs on, instead of buying a platform and staffing the build yourself. That covers picking a warehouse, getting data out of your source systems and into it, modelling it into definitions the business agrees on, and wrapping the result in enough tests and monitoring that it stays correct once everyone stops paying attention to it.
The modelling is where these projects are won or lost, and it is the part that looks cheapest from the outside. Loading data is close to a solved problem now. Getting finance and product to agree what a customer is, when one counts contracts and the other counts logins, is not, and that argument decides whether anyone believes the dashboard you end up with.
Judge any proposal on what you are left holding. If your team can change the thing after handover, it worked. If you are left with a document of recommendations and nobody free to act on them, you have bought an opinion at implementation prices.
When to hire, and when not to
Working this out now costs you an hour. Working it out in month three costs you the budget, the quarter, and some of the credit you spent getting the project approved.
Worth hiring for
- You have data in more places than one person can hold in their head, and the answers disagree depending on who runs the query.
- Someone has already tried once. There is a half-finished warehouse, or a set of pipelines nobody wants to touch, and the next attempt needs to not be a third one.
- You need it correct by a date that matters: a board meeting, an audit, a diligence process, a funding round.
- You have engineers who could do it, and a backlog that means they will not get to it for two quarters.
Probably not yet
The middle two are order of operations rather than a no. Both are work we run, and a day-long Decision Workshop is usually how they get settled. They just have to happen before the build.
- –One source system and one team using it. A warehouse is overhead until reporting starts contradicting itself.
- –Your metrics are not defined yet. We can run that with you, and it is a short piece of work, but it has to land before the build: a warehouse sets the definitions it is given in concrete.
- –Nobody owns the numbers yet. Same answer. We can bring the best practice and chair the argument, and it needs settling first, or the warehouse drifts back out of trust after handover.
- –You are shopping for a document. A written recommendation nobody has the capacity to implement is the most expensive form of nothing.
What data warehouse consulting services cover
Data warehouse consulting services get sold as a bundle almost everywhere you look. Yours would be drawn from some of this and never all of it, and anyone quoting you for the whole list is selling a program rather than solving the thing that made you start looking.
- Design: choosing the warehouse, the layout, and the grain, then writing down why, so the next person inherits the reasoning and not just the tables.
- Ingestion from the sources you actually run, including the awkward ones, rather than the reference architecture.
- Modelling in dbt: staging, intermediate, and mart layers, with tests and lineage that can be read by someone who did not write them.
- Migration off a legacy warehouse, a set of extracts, or the spreadsheet that quietly became production.
- Cost and performance work, which usually means storage layout, clustering, and the handful of queries responsible for most of the bill.
- Monitoring and alerting, so breakage surfaces before a stakeholder finds it.
- Documentation and handover as deliverables with a date on them, not as a favour at the end.
Cloud data warehouse consulting services
If you are stuck choosing a platform, you can relax slightly. That choice matters less than the vendor demos suggest, and it is reversible at a cost you can estimate. What you cannot easily undo is a bad model, an ungoverned account, or a bill nobody can explain.
Your account, your controls
The warehouse is built in your cloud account under your own identity provider and network rules. There is nothing of ours to license and nothing proprietary holding it together, so there is nothing to unwind later.
Platform choice on the merits
Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Redshift all work. Which one suits you depends on what your team already knows, where your data lives, and how spiky the workload is. Often the platform you are already paying for is fine, which is worth knowing before you buy a second one.
Built where you can watch it
In your repositories, with the same engineers every week and commits you can read as they land. Reviews are on your terms, not staged at a monthly checkpoint.
We work in Snowflake and Databricks most often, and hold implementation partnerships with both. Platform detail lives on our Snowflake page and our Databricks page.
Who your data warehouse consultants would be
Most firms sell you one team and staff you another. You will meet someone senior during the sale, so ask whoever you are talking to, including us, whether that person is still on the project in week six and what happens to your timeline when they are not.
- A US-based senior data leader designs the engagement and stays your point of contact for its duration. You meet that person before you spend anything.
- The same engineers work in your tools week to week, so you explain your business once rather than re-explaining it to a new face every month.
- Every consultant on the project has ten years of experience or more, which means none of your budget is paying for someone to learn on your warehouse.
- If your team wants to do part of the build themselves, that is a normal way for this to go, and it lowers the price.
What to ask any data warehouse consultant before you sign
Put them to us as readily as to anyone else on your list. The answers separate firms faster than the proposals do.
- Who is actually on the project, and are they the people in this meeting? Ask for names and the week they start.
- What have you built that looks like ours? Not a logo wall. A description specific enough that you could ask a follow-up question about it.
- What would you not do here? A data warehouse consultant with no opinion about what to leave out has not thought about your problem yet.
- What does handover look like, and what is written down? If the answer is a walkthrough call, the knowledge leaves when they do.
- What happens if this takes longer than scoped? Find out who absorbs that before you sign, not after.
If a data lake is the real question
Warehouse and lake work overlap and the same team does both. Which one you need depends on how much of your data is structured and how much of it you are keeping in case it turns out to be useful later. It is a reasonable thing to settle in the scoping call before anyone quotes you for either.
Questions about data warehouse consulting
The things people ask before the first call.
Data warehouse consulting is hiring a team to design and build the central store your reporting runs on, instead of buying the platform and staffing the build yourself. In practice that means picking a warehouse, getting data out of your source systems and into it, modelling that data into definitions the business agrees on, and putting tests and monitoring around it so it stays correct. The engagement should end with your team owning the result and able to change it.
Get a scope and a price before you commit anything
A short working session with the senior lead who would run the engagement, and one specific problem priced in writing. Yours to act on however you like, including elsewhere.
