10/01/09
If you’re a data warehouse professional—or you work closely with one—you’ve probably noticed themany new options for data warehouse platforms that have appeared this decade. Find out more in this Best Practices Report
TDWI's Best Practices Reports educate technical and business professionals about emerging issues in business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). These in-depth reports offer objective, vendor-neutral research consisting of interviews with practitioners and industry experts, as well as a survey of BI professionals worldwide. The reports are sponsored by vendors who collectively wish to evangelize a BI/DW discipline or emerging technology.
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Next Generation Data Warehouse Platforms
If you’re a data warehouse professional—or you work closely with one—you’ve probably noticed themany new options for data warehouse platforms that have appeared this decade.We’ve seen the emergence of new categories of data warehouse (DW) platforms, such as datawarehouse appliances and software appliances. A new interest in columnar databases has led toseveral new vendor products and renewed interest in older ones. Open source Linux is now commonin data warehousing, and open source databases, data integration tools, and reporting platformshave come out of nowhere to establish a firm foothold. In the hardware realm, 64-bit computinghas enabled larger in-memory data caches, and more vendors now offer MPP architectures. Leadingdatabase vendors have added more features and products conducive to data warehousing.
Those are mostly features within the data warehouse platform, especially its database. There are alsogrowing practices that are demanding support from the platform, including real-time integrationbetween the data warehouse platform and operational applications, various types of advancedanalytics, and reusable interfaces exposed through Web services or service-oriented architecture(SOA). Furthermore, a number of data warehouse platforms and other business intelligence platformsare now readily available through software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing.
The good news is that the options for data warehouse platforms have recently become far morenumerous. The bad news is that it’s difficult for data warehouse professionals and their businesssponsors to keep track of these advancements and select the ones that are appropriate for their needs.To help organizations understand the many new options available to them, this report catalogs thenew data warehouse platform products, features, and techniques that have appeared this decade, plusnotable advances in more established data warehouse platforms. As examples, the report mentionsmany vendors and their products. Many organizationsare planning the next generation of their data warehouse, and this report provides information thatcan be instrumental for such planning. The focus is on technology, but this report also explains howtechnology’s adoption in next generation data warehouse platforms is driven by real-world businessand organizational needs and requirements.
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