Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog: Is The Future Of Data Warehousing "Distributed Intelligence"?

Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog: Is The Future Of Data Warehousing "Distributed Intelligence"?: "Michael Carter has just put together an article, 'The Death Of Data Warehousing', that again questions the need for a data warehouse, but in this case proposes replacing it with decentralised, distributed 'Business Information Networks' that answer questions for particular departments or functions, and communicate using web services. According to the article:" ......

Very good write up, and I agree with alot of it. Good links to presentations also, which bring to mind all kinds of questions (if Oracle are experts on integration/CRM/etc, then why on earth couldnt my sales rep ever give me a list of all the licenses my company was paying support on? And why wasn't it available anywhere online? And if supporting open standards is so important, why is Oracle the the only major IM vendor not part of the major group pushing IM integration?) but that is way off on a tagent. The writeup itself discusses a proposal to forget about the mammoth central DW idea and stick with Data Marts.

The author has a point, in that about every DW suffers from flaws - they take too long to update, control is too restricted, and following the best practice of every Data Mart feeding from that warehouse leads to huge delays that line managers who are responsible for profit and loss dont want to wait for. For those managers that can affect profit given immediate access to information, I have to agree, yes, data from their own systems closest to them needs to be immediately available, and that a slight different version of the truth is an acceptable trade-off for speed of action. They can have a much more positive effect on revenue than the ivory tower can, and need that intelligence as close to the action as possible.

But the DW is still invaluable for overall reporting, and especially for data mining. The limitations of speed and availability are technological limitations, some of which are imposed by vendors (prohibitive, incremental license models for front ends, for example). As CPUs, disk access, and networks become faster that delay will grow shorter and shorter. It may take many years before it becomes timely enough for a sales manager to act on a trend though, but the technology will be there soon enough.

Mark Rittman's blog is probably the only blog that I read every single word of what gets posted.