I’ve noticed lately that data warehouse vendors are dusting off the arguments and pitches of days gone by. Don’t buy specialized hardware for your database needs! You’ll never be able to re-use the gear! One rep recently told a client, “With your data warehouse on our hardware, you can re-purpose the hardware at any time!”
The truth is, while data warehouse failures were rampant a few years ago, those failures are now the exception and not the rule. Data warehouses, once installed, tend to last a while. The good ones actually add more data over time and become more entrenched among user organizations. The great ones become strategic, and business people claim not to be able to do their jobs without them. A data warehouse platform is rarely for a single use, but for a multitude of needs. Data warehouses rarely just go away.
However don’t confuse an entrenched data warehouse with an entrenched data integration solution. I’ll teach a class at The Data Warehousing Institute conferences called “Architectural Options for Data Integration.” The class covers technologies like Enterprise Application Integration (EAI); Enterprise Information Integration (EII); Extract Transformation and Loading (ETL, and its sister, ELT); and Master Data Management (MDM). I present use cases for these different solutions as well as lists of the key vendors that offer them.
Evan Levy's blog can also be found at http://baseline-consulting.typepad.com/evanlevy/.
I agree that there is no such thing as a rip-and-replace data warehouse. The EDW, a critical enabler to most BI and analytics today, continues to be at the core of most enterprises data integration strategies today and in the near future.
Recognizing this, it is incumbent on those of us who provide the other "Architecture Options for Data Integration" to communicate how our offerings extend and add value to the ever present data warehouse toward a better future-state integation architecture.
At Composite Software, where I work, we did this in a white paper titled simply "Seven Ways Composite Data Virtualization Complements Enterprise Data Warehousing." Readers can download it at www.compositesw.com.
- Robert Eve, EVP Composite Software
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