Business Intelligence Network business intelligence resources

Blog: William McKnight

« Midmarket Business Intelligence: LucidEra review | Main | Criteria for a Data Warehouse DBMS Selection »

The realities of Data Warehousing today

I was just thinking about what the unique realities of data warehousing today are. As I see it, the top realities are:

• Multiple, complex applications serving a variety of users
• Exploding data size that will continue to explode with RFID, POS, CDR, and all manner of transactional data extending back years into history
• Data latency is becoming intolerable as needs demand real-time data
• A varied set of data access tools, serving a variety of purposes, for each data warehouse
• Multiple workloads streaming into the data warehouse from varied corners of the company as well as from outside the company
• A progression towards more frequent, even continuous, loading
• Data types running the gamut beyond traditional alphanumeric types

  Posted by William McKnight on October 10, 2006 9:05 PM |

Comments

Great post.

At the same time there is some light at the end of the tunnel:
LOB systems and vendors are shipping platforms with their applications that are optimized and automate the data collection and OLAP generation

So where is the problem:
These are all separate platforms and you still need to aggregate the data in order to make your BI strategy work

Unless…
Some vendors are taking a different approach that leans less on “standard BI platform” and moving towards a more realistic approach of “Standard BI application”. In that scenario an application can query simultaneously multiple sources, bring them together at the application layer and solve many complexities. Panorama software (the Company I work for) is doing just that.

The benefit: a customer can use the platform that ships with their line of business systems. A platform that is optimized and maintained automatically by the system. And while having a couple of platforms can use a single set of applications that ride on top of those existing platforms.

Posted by: Oudi Antebi | October 10, 2006 10:03 PM

All true, and to "Multiple workloads streaming into the data warehouse", I would add Multiple workloads streaming OUT OF the Data Warehouse TO varied corners within the company and even to partners outside the company.

Posted by: Stuart Mullins | October 11, 2006 10:09 AM

Post a comment