A data platform is a collection of tools and services that help you manage and analyze data. It includes everything from data storage and processing to data visualization and reporting.

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Components of a Data Platform

At the very basic level, a data platform consists of the following components:

  • A data warehouse that stores and processes data.
  • Data pipelines for moving data between different components.
  • An orchestration layer that manages the schedules and execution order of data pipelines.

In addition to these core components, a data platform may also include:

  • Data visualization tools for creating reports and dashboards.
  • Data catalogs for discovering and understanding data.
  • Data governance tools for managing data access and security.

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Core Responsibilities of a Data Platform

You may have heard of terms like ETL or ELT, but essentially every data platform needs to perform the following tasks:

  1. Extract: Get data from different sources like databases, APIs, and files and bring it into your data warehouse.
  2. Transform: Clean, enrich, and aggregate the data so that it is ready for analysis.

Once the data has been transformed into a usable format, a data platform also provides ways to consume the data. The most common ways to consume data are:

  1. Business Intelligence or Data Visualisation: Create reports and dashboards to monitor business performance, track KPIs, and make data-driven decisions.
  2. Reverse ETL: Send data back to your source systems or other business applications for improved customer experience, personalization, automation and other operational use cases.

Data platforms can be on the cloud or on-premises, batched or real-time and can be built using a variety of tools and technologies.

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