Why You Shouldn’t Build Reports From Raw Data

Charles Wang's article discusses the importance of data warehousing in today's business intelligence landscape. He highlights that while connecting data directly from sources to BI tools can be useful for one-time explorations, it is not a sustainable approach for building dashboards and pursuing data-driven decision-making. Wang outlines several drawbacks to this approach, including the risk of using outdated or poorly structured data, lack of consistency, version control, collaboration, and transparency within an organization. He emphasizes that data warehousing is necessary for any organization whose spreadsheets have become unmanageable, as it provides a common access point with standardized versions and formats. Wang recommends using tools like Fivetran to build data pipelines instead of relying on integrated connectors offered by some BI platforms.