The Informed Company

Chapter TwoThe Need to Replicate Source Data

Each query, whether it's sent through a business intelligence tool, a SQL workbench, or something similar, requests data from a source. It takes technical resources, time, and computing energy to serve queries. This is especially relevant when running queries “against” a “production database” (see Figure 2.1), as too many queries, especially ones that take a long time to run, can bog down machinery (and don't forget how cluttered dashboards can cause many queries to run at once).

Production Systems

A production system is any system that serves critical business functions to users. An example of a production database system is one that powers an application for users to buy this book on the internet and handles credit card transactions. We advise against querying data directly from production systems due to its potential ability to interfere with your live application.

Figure 2.1 A production system should be used with care.

Newer businesses investigating their internal data tend to draw from live, or production, systems. In other words, they run analysis‐type queries directly on their data sources. While this is okay for tools like Salesforce or Google Analytics, mainly because querying doesn't impact their performance at ...