I normally treat these debates on the paternity of the term
"data warehouse" with a joke and a smile and let them go right
by. But Bill Inmon's latest newsletter
article is just too factually incorrect to let it go without rebuttal.
In the article, Bill says:
'So let's examine the facts, something that "RAUL634" does not care to take
into account.
In the mid 1980s, Barry Devlin, a research associate of IBM in Ireland, wrote
an article discussing an "information warehouse." The article was written in
the IBM Systems Journal. The article went on to address some vague and
generally undefined concepts about the thing called an "information
warehouse."'
Bill - please check YOUR facts before going into print.
My (and Paul Murphy's) 1988 IBM Systems Journal article described an
architecture, of which the key component was the "Business Data
Warehouse". It was far from vague, although it was certainly high
level. It introduced and defined many of the concepts that continue to be
at the core of the data warehouse today. Since IBM still owns copyright
on the full article, I can't publish it here, but here is the key figure from it, and FACT - it
does use the term "data warehouse" and define it with sufficient
clarity that most people would accept it as the forerunner of the data
warehouse today.
And here is the link to the full document on
the IBM website, although you now have to pay to download it.
I can also state as a FACT that I and others within IBM Europe were using the
term "data warehouse" internally as early as 1985-86. However,
despite widespread search, I have never found the term used in the public domain
before my 1988 paper.
Furthermore, it is a well-known and easily discoverable FACT that IBM announced
the "Information Warehouse" in 1991.
And Bill - if you're really keen on facts - I suggest that you edit your own
bio: "Bill is universally recognized as the father of the data
warehouse." By my dictionary, "universally recognized"
means that literally everybody accepts the attribution. Clearly, some would
disagree...
Posted August 6, 2009 8:49 AM
Permalink | 1 Comment |
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I always though Inmon's claim was inflated. Now I have proof.
Being the father of something suggests giving birth and nuturing the entire analytic industry along. Inmon's contribution appears to be he wrote some public definitions and a book. Naming and defining something is not the same as making it happen.
Consider that Pilot Software was running analytic financial analysis on Dec VAX in 1986. Today we call this CPM. Britton-Lee was founded in 1979 to build database machines (more correctly data mart machines) and sold a boat load of them until they got bought 1989. Of course, the IBM Mainframe using DB2 was being heavily used for data marts in the 1980s -- I know, I was there. Then Teradata comes along with Neches and Walter and design the first parallel beasty that will be the cornerstone of the industry for years. Let's also not ignore the contributions of major BI Tools vendors in making this market such as startups like Cognos, Microstrategy, and Business Objects. And wasn't SAS building mainframe marts in the 1970s so people could control mainframe workloads? Inmon did not father any of this.
Shall we quibble whether every one of these vendors and products fits Inmon's definition? He would like that. I say no. True data warehouses did not appear until WalMart showed Teradata the real power of parallel SQL in the mid-1990s. Up until then, AT&T and BT were hammering out humongous data marts in the 1980s. Did Inmons published definitions have any influence on these marts and warehouse? Probably not. Or maybe a smidgen. Good people did magnificent things long before anyone had heard of Bill Inmon.
OK. So if Inmon is the father of something, does he really claim the good work of all these customers and vendors all sprang from his gudiance? A better question than "who invented the term data warehouse?" would be "who was it that told Inmon he was the father?"