Joel Vander Weele wrote this just before lunchtime:
Greetings. I just got a email newsletter from Bill Inmon at http://www.inmoncif.com.
For those of you not familiar with Mr. Inmon, he is one of the the two gurus of Data Warehousing…Ralph Kimball is the other.
I found Bill’s short email on the history and current state of Data Warehousing as being quite interesting…Certainly, many data warehouses out there have not followed the either Inmon’s or Kimball’s approaches to data modelling, but this is to be expected. In a world of economic scarcity, pressure is put on all of us to deliver something that works…not something that follows textbook theory. That being said, Data warehousing projects are not delivering the value they should, so new approaches, such as DW 2.0 are needed.
The key issue however is not a technical one..it is a matter of changing how businesses use and collect information. The perfect technical platform in an organization that doesnt believe in making decisions based on information is worthless.
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Dear DW 2.0 Reader
The School of Business (Center for Corporate Education) at Virginia Commonwealth University will host the Bill Inmon DW2.0 Certification Course, March 4 - 6, 2008
Join Bill Inmon at VCU’s Center for Corporate Education in Richmond, Virginia, for a three-day DW2.0 certification course. Become certified and have your name listed on Bill Inmon’s website.
You do not want to miss this class.
Comments from previous attendees:
“The world has needed a redefinition of data warehousing for a long time.”
“Definitely a great eye opener.”
“Some very interesting points were brought up that I hadn’t considered before.”
Click here for more information.
WHY DW2.0?
Data warehousing began in the mid 1980s. By 1990, the first book on data warehousing had been written and seminars were just beginning. Soon thereafter, data marts, operational data stores, descision support systems applications and a whole host of other extensions to the data warehouse began to appear.
At the same time, technology began to appear that made data warehousing commercially viable. There was the extension of DBMS to start to be able to handle very large volumes of data. There was a drop in disk storage prices. There was the advent of new forms of storage such as near line storage. There were the business intelligence vendors. In short, the world of data warehousing went from a theoretical possibility to a burgeoning reality in a few short years.
From a thought leadership perspective, something unusual began to happen. Consulting firms were building data warehouses that really weren’t data warehouses. Some vendors began to talk about real-time data warehouses and active data warehouses when no such thing existed as part of data warehousing. Some conferences that focused on data warehousing held many presentations on solutions that were not data warehousing. In those presentations, the concept of a data warehouse was changed from what a data warehouse really was to a form of data warehousing that was simply not valid. Yet, these non-data warehouse structures were called data warehouses. And, finally, even consultants issued reports that measured the size of data warehouses that included all sorts of databases that were not remotely data warehouses.
In a word, the thought leadership that once had been very clear surrounding data warehouses, turned very murky. People were using any old notion of data warehousing or something resembling data warehousing to sell their products and services - whether the notion was proper or not.
Into this sea of confusion comes DW2.0 - the architecture for the next generation of data warehousing.
Best Regards,
Bill Inmon
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