Is an Enterprise Data Warehouse Still Required for Business Intelligence?

The number of business intelligence (BI) solutions appearing in the marketplace is steadily increasing. Most of these solutions still employ the services of a traditional enterprise data warehouse, but an increasing number do not. In some operational BI applications, for example, event data volumes and/or the need for fast action times may prevent the data from being persisted in a data warehouse before it is analyzed. These latter applications do not replace the enterprise data warehouse, but often work in conjunction with it – the results from the analytical processing may be stored in the enterprise data warehouse, for example.

As the BI industry evolves, so too does the role of the traditional enterprise data warehouse. The title of this article is deliberately provocative. My objective is to encourage BI professionals to consider the role of the data warehouse in new BI projects. In the past, the enterprise data warehouse has been the cornerstone for such projects, but I believe in many situations this is no longer true.

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