Describe data product categories
Data systems
Spreadsheets are useful for gathering and visualizing modest-sized datasets, and are an ideal solution when working individually, or collaborating with a small team. You can quickly sort, filter, and aggregate data to share ideas and insights. However, it's likely that your organization has a centralized data processing system for larger datasets, and for sharing data with the wider enterprise.
A business needs to store relational data so that it can be joined together to tell a story. For example, customers, orders, and products are all related. To analyze sales trends, you need to join a customer to an order, and an order to a product.
Data frequently exists in a non-relational format. Systems may output files in a format that requires processing, to integrate the contents into a relational data store that can be queried. This is common when working with third-party systems that haven't been developed in-house, such as systems used for manufacturing and distribution.
Also, accounting departments frequently process invoices and reconcile purchase orders, so files must be stored, and their contents extracted, if required for analysis or observation.
Analytical solutions integrate the data from these systems into a single source that can be used for reporting. You then create reports to inform business decisions, and enlighten stakeholders who monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
In this video, you'll see how data from different areas within an organization can be processed into a central reporting data store: