Recently I made a key-note presentation at Array Communications conference in the Netherlands.  There were 50 people in the room, and it was a good crowd.  There are quite a few shifts occurring in the EDW/BI market space, and there are some reasons why changes are happening.  Game changing technology is coming to the market in ETL, services, hardware, databases, and applications.

Ok folks, I'm back.  I've spent the last six months reading, writing (and arithmetic - that's a joke... ha-ha...)  seriously, implementing solutions, visiting customer sites, and seeing what's going on in the world; and to that end, the DW/BI world is changing.  You've seen me write about this before, but now it's on-top of your head.

Like it or not...  Your Data Warehouse IS a System Of Record, and if it isn't in 2009, it WILL BE before the end of 2010.  So what does that mean?

There are many trends afoot in the industry, but I think there are two or three that are here to stay, and quite frankly, they will make a huge impact on the way BI/EDW is done.  Some of the technologies that are ground-shaking and game-changing include Solid State Disk, Database appliances on the Cloud, and data services on the cloud.  I've been watching the Database market now for several years, and here are a few of my predictions for 2010.

If you've started a Master Data project, or you are working with Metadata at the business levels, then you probably are familiar with the need for ontological classification of terms.  If you aren't familiar with Ontologies (at an entry level), then I would say that you will have a tough time putting together successful MDM or Master Metadata components for your EDW/BI solution.

There are quite a few vendors out there who publish industry logical data models.  I've had my fare share of direct, hands-on experience with them over the last 8 to 10 years.  In this entry I will share a few of the pros and cons of these classifications of models. My objective is more of an inquisitive one, in hopes that you will respond with your experiences, and if you are a vendor: please post your opinions.

The market has been asking for EDW's to deal with more and more real-time based data.  IT on the other hand has become "slower and less agile" as their current system of federated data marts gets larger and larger.  In this entry we will deal with some of the issues, some of the questions, and of course offer an opinion into the insight of dealing with true real-time data sets arriving at the doorstep of the EDW.

I've always felt that this blog (with the agreement from Bill Inmon, Shawn Rogers, and Ron Powell) is a place for me to express my guarded, guided, and best possible opinion about vendors, the industry, industry direction.  I've also long believed that vendors DO HAVE GREAT PRODUCTS, but sometimes their marketing and sales campaigns get a little over-zelous and advertise "features" that simply arent' quite true, or that the product doesn't behave in the situations they claim it does.

Recently however, I've been getting "flack" from certain areas of the industry because some of the vendors who read my blog don't like what I'm saying.  They are exerting indirect pressure on my friends and industry affiliations to "disconnect me, take me off the map." Claiming I have no right to share my information on this blog, and questioning if I should even be an industry analyst in the first place.

This entry is a question to all my readers (vendors included), and I hope you will respond with your thoughts and comments.

There are many definitions of governance, compliance, and accountability in the industry, and it seems as though many of us are struggling to define it for the EDW/BI space in some generically acceptable way.  As I've recently researched these subjects (and been involved in them for years) I've noticed a trend that many of the definitions are vertically challenged (if you will).  They focus on a vertical industry rather than on horizontal enterprise data warehousing. 

In this entry I'll add my two cents to this noise as just another voice of opinion on these subjects.

This by no means is meant to be an exhaustive list, however some of you may find it helpful. It's a set of information about Very Large Data Warehousing I've gleaned over the years.  I hope you enjoy it, and please add your own knowledge by commenting on this entry.

I've been working heads down quite a bit lately on building new releases, and of course on new research and design.  I appologize for the silence on my blog to all my faithful readers.  The good news is that Data Vault Data Modeling is taking off in the world, mostly due to compliance, governance, and auditability requirements faced by major industries.  You can follow this on http://www.DataVaultInstitute.com - free forums

On another note this entry will explore some of the R&D notions that I'm currently developing.