How does BCP compare with a data warehouse?
BCP and data warehouses are designed with different purposes. BCP is very good at multi-level, multi-site, extra-intra enterprise collaboration and consolidation of spreadsheet data. It provides a stable transactional database to any spreadsheet process. When working with a data warehouse for any collaborative purposes, you will face the following problems: • Flexibility Changes to the reporting structures are inevitable. With a data warehouse this means high setup and maintenance costs. It means that data warehouse expertise and IT support is needed on an ongoing basis. That means adding new columns or adding new rows is cumbersome and expensive. • Offline update of spreadsheet data BCP allows users to work in isolation to mature data and then merge the changes to share with others in the collaboration automatically. This means that more than one person can work concurrently on the same region in Excel without any problem. This is not possible in a data warehouse as users overwrite ea