We talk to construction IT managers every day about construction data warehouses and business intelligence. Many people think that building a data warehouse means that you have to transform data and transfer or push it from several databases into one data warehouse. In the last few years data warehouse technology has evolved so you can leave data in it’s native location and include it in reports across systems. You can even combine traditional data warehouses where you move or synchronize data with data from other systems to create a broader data warehouse.
For example our clients that use Sage Timberline Office deploy our anterraDataCenter™ product to synchronize data from Pervasive databases (one per data folder) into a single Microsoft SQL database. This effectively gives them a Sage Timberline SQL database. This SQL database then becomes PART of another data warehouse when we write reports for our construction BI software that spans other systems like a CRM to get sales information to prepare work backlog forecasts.
