Data engineering
The plumbing under the dashboard.
Unglamorous, invisible when it works, and the reason reporting either stays current on its own or quietly rots.
Werehouse Media builds data warehouses and the pipelines that feed them for UK businesses: one defined store underneath the reporting, loaded automatically from the systems that hold the data. A data audit is £495, warehouse and pipeline work starts at £3,500, and a full platform at £4,500. It is built on your own cloud accounts, documented, and handed over.
What it is
A warehouse is not a database with ambitions.
It is a separate store, shaped for questions rather than for transactions, holding history the source systems throw away and definitions the source systems do not have. Reporting reads from it, so reporting stops competing with the live system for resources and stops changing shape every time a vendor updates their schema.
Pipelines
Scheduled jobs that pull from each source on their own, handle the failures, and leave a record of what ran and when.
A modelled store
Postgres or BigQuery, structured so a question has one obvious place to be answered from, rather than five joins nobody can remember. The same warehouse is what a bespoke application reads from when the answer has to be on a screen somebody uses daily.
Defined metrics
Revenue, active customer, job completed: written down once, computed once, used everywhere. This is what stops two reports disagreeing.
History that survives
Source systems overwrite. A warehouse keeps the shape of last quarter so you can still ask what changed.
When it is worth it
Three or more sources, or history that matters.
Below that threshold, reporting can usually read the live systems directly and a warehouse is expense without benefit. We will tell you which side of the line you are on before quoting.
You have outgrown direct connections
Dashboards querying live systems get slow, and get throttled by the vendor at the worst moment.
You are replacing a system
Whatever you are migrating off holds history you will want later. Extracting it into a warehouse first means the switch does not cost you the past. See migration.
Definitions keep drifting
Every new report re-invents what a metric means. A modelled store makes that a one-time decision.
Reporting is a person's job
If somebody spends days a month assembling numbers, the pipeline pays for itself in their time alone.
Why businesses choose us for this
What you get that you would not get elsewhere.
Built on your cloud, not ours
BigQuery, Postgres or whatever fits, inside your own accounts. If you replaced us tomorrow the warehouse would keep running and another engineer could pick it up from the documentation.
Failures are visible
Every pipeline is monitored and alerts a human when it breaks. Silent failures are the reason people stop trusting dashboards, and they are entirely avoidable.
We connect it to the reporting
The warehouse is not the deliverable, the answer is. It is built alongside the reporting that reads it, by the same people.
Fixed price, staged
From £3,500, quoted in writing, delivered in stages you can stop between, with something working at the end of each one.
Prices
Published, and fixed before anything is built.
| Data audit | £495, credited in full against any build over £2,000. Where the numbers live now, which ones disagree, and what it would take to make them agree. You keep the findings whether or not we do the work. |
|---|---|
| Reporting build | From £1,950. Your existing systems joined to a dashboard that refreshes itself: the numbers you check weekly, on one screen, with the definitions written down. |
| Warehouse and pipelines | From £3,500. A proper store underneath, fed automatically from the systems that hold the data, so reporting stops depending on anyone exporting anything. |
| Full data platform | From £4,500. Multiple sources, defined rules, historical data carried across, and dashboards for more than one audience. |
| Keeping it running | From £49 a month. Pipelines monitored, failures alerted to a human, and changes made as the business changes. No contract. |
A third books the work, a third on the first working version, the balance before it goes live. See everything in detail
Read this before you enquire
What we will not take on.
A warehouse you do not need
If two systems with good APIs cover your reporting, we will say so and build the reporting instead. That is a smaller invoice and the right answer.
Real-time streaming architecture
Sub-second pipelines are a different discipline with different tooling. Nightly and hourly loads cover almost every business this size.
Petabyte-scale engineering
If the volume genuinely is that large, a specialist team is the right call and we will say so.
Machine learning platforms
We build the clean, defined data a model would need. Training and deploying the model itself is somebody else's job.
Straight answers
The ones people actually ask.
What does a data warehouse consultant actually cost?
Ours is fixed price rather than a day rate. Warehouse and pipeline work starts at £3,500, after a £495 audit that establishes what is actually needed and is credited against builds over £2,000.
BigQuery or Postgres?
Postgres for most businesses this size: cheaper, familiar, and more than fast enough. BigQuery where the volumes are genuinely large or the rest of the stack is already Google.
How long does it take?
Four to eight weeks for a first warehouse with two or three sources feeding it, delivered in stages rather than as one drop at the end.
What happens when a source system changes?
Pipelines are written to fail loudly rather than silently, and care from £49 a month covers keeping them current as the tools around them change.
Can you work with our existing warehouse?
Yes. Taking over an inherited or half-finished build is common, and the audit will say plainly whether it is worth keeping.
Related: Data & analytics Business intelligence & Power BI Data migration & cleansing Systems integration
Next step
What is the reporting waiting on?
Tell us which systems hold the data and what you need to get out of them. You will get a fixed price and an honest view on whether you need a warehouse at all.