Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence   Market Trends

Where next for warehouses?

Martin Veares of Xansa presents a persuasive review of how data warehousing developed, and maps out how it will advance.

To begin at the beginning. Over the past 10 years the collection of analytical tools and techniques that sit under the banner of data warehousing have had a profound effect on the way companies are able to carry out their business.

It is now possible to bring together data from numerous transactional systems into one place, and then present that information to the business through a self-serve OLAP tool. Non-technical business users can answer for themselves questions such as: “Which customers in our north region have moved on to our newer product line since it was introduced, and how profitable have those sales been?”

In the past, the main business drivers behind developments in data warehousing have centred on the issues of centralisation, performance, information delivery and explainability.

This lead to the development of the four pillars of data warehousing technology, namely:

Centralisation – ETL tools to extract, cleanse and manage the process of loading data into our new data repositories.

Performance – some software vendors responded with proprietary multi-dimensional tools, while others led us down development paths which skewed our data models to their own version of aggregate management, which was sometimes cleverly integrated with sparsity management.

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International Consultants' Guide May 2001
Copyright © 2001 Prime Marketing Publications