Wal-Mart's 460 TB Teradata warehouse

Slashdot points to The New York Times > What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits, a writeup on how WalMart uses 460 TB of customer transaction data to forecast demand and increase revenue. Prime example are how the CIO asked to forecast what items will be in most demand when a hurricane hits, based on past data (answer: 7 times the normal volume of pop-tarts, and even more than that in beer), and studies like if someone comes in for cold medicine, they also buy some soup and orange juice (so why discount all 3? 2 is plenty.)

Taking it one step farther, there's some discussion about how they can actually arrange for suppliers to own the item until it is sold at the register (so technically, wal-mart will own no inventory).

A very good read, and a great illustration about how to think of the datawarehouse as a tool to take advantage of opportunities based on past trends. It got me thinking along several lines about how to better leverage some of the projects I am working on.