A wave of innovation is sweeping across the enterprise data landscape, causing data management purists to sit up and take notice. For nearly two decades most of us have planned, built, maintained and defended the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The EDW has played a critical role in how we serve our businesses with information and, for most of us, has proven to be an excellent investment. Early on, the EDW did an excellent job of serving the needs of business intelligence professionals, but was often challenged to maintain pace with how information use was evolving.

Today, the EDW is under pressure from forces that were not present as recently as five years ago. These changes don’t spell the end of the EDW era, but certainly indicate that the ecosystem will expand to include new technologies and systems.

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Raw is More

by John Bantleman on May 11, 2012

Big Data as an industry buzzword doesn’t appear to be fading in popularity any time soon. In fact, the data management sector has hardly seen this much innovation and excitement for quite some time. From one perspective, it is great that everyone agrees with the Big Data definition, using the criteria of volume, velocity, variety and value, and that Hadoop and MapReduce have become synonymous with anything Big Data related.

However, Big Data is more of a business problem, and it will be interesting to see how organizations roll out new infrastructure and technology to answer business-user demands for access to new data that now comes in multistructured data types from multiple different sources.

The truth is Big Data isn’t really a new phenomenon. For many industries, it has been a real challenge for years – even decades. Think of financial services trading and tick data, or telecommunications call detail records and the volume of web logs from our smartphones and mobile devices. Collecting, storing and analyzing this data has been a struggle for well over a decade, and it’s further exacerbated because of the growth in mobile apps – 4GE and LTE access that will only compound existing growth rates.

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