Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Its all about the architecture

Whenever one looks at Mt.Rushmore or the Eiffel tower, one admires the architecture and the technical finesse behind these constructions. Similarly when we see a fully functional data warehouse with all the bells and whistles on the input and output side, which provides sustained performance, we call it the perfect balance between hardware and software architectures.

When it comes to data warehousing and business intelligence programs, the tools that are needed to implement the pervasive side of the solution is one piece of the giant puzzle. The core of any initiative in this spectrum lies with the architecture.

Why do we emphasize on the architecture? in a nutshell, if the architecture blueprint for the data warehouse is not defined and designed correctly, it starts slowing down the multiple layers of data processing leaving the users frustrated and IT baffled. Incorrectly designed systems often lead to program failures and that often gets blamed on poor requirements definition and so on.

There are several layers of architecture in a data warehouse, you start with data architecture, ETL architecture, database architecture, BI architecture and security architecture. All these layers also are integrated and presented in a solution architecture. Although one can argue that a large part of this is infrastructure, event that team requires and architect to lead the effort.

in order to ensure success of any data warehouse and business intelligence initiative, I strongly recommend that all areas of architecture be considered as a team and be chartered with the responsibility to build out the best suited architecture. As we move towards the cloud computing era, data warehouses will exist in clouds and be accessible across the enterprise. This will demand better architects as just discussed.

Hence in the end of the day it is all about the architectures.

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