Where is data warehousing going?

April 22, 2005      (Page 1 of 2)

To most people, data warehousing, data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) applications may sound a bit confusing, but that apparently doesn’t stop some companies from saying "mine's bigger than your's".

We’re obviously talking about the terabyte size of an organization’s data warehouse, of course. At the ETL: The Humble Champion of Data Warehousing conference, held this week in Toronto, execs talked about the changing face of data integration.

In his opening keynote, Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer (CTO) and self-described ETL guru for Teradata (a subsidiary of Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp.) dicussed some current and future data warehouse challenges enterprises are up against. According to Brobst, “appetite for data is outpacing Moore’s Law.”

He said more data will be created in the next two years than in the past 40,000 years. The need for data integration technology is growing, particularly as organizations seek methods to build a consolidated view of information scattered across disparate internal and external systems. That said, organizations must have a strategy and best practices in place for dealing with all that data.

“Data is not good enough - information is the goal,” Brobst said, adding that while the size of an enterprise’s data warehouse does matter, more important is having a holistic and single view of the customer and eliminating all planned and unplanned downtime.

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