Who Needs a Data Warehouse?
Column published in DMReview.com September 1, 2005 —by Gabriel Fuchs Our data warehouse is so big, it only comes into work when it feels like it. At my job, we have realized that we need a data warehouse. It was actually quite easy to make this decision – everyone else has one so, therefore, we should obviously have one as well. In order to be better than everyone else, we have, however, not stopped at a data warehouse. We decided to go for the whole kit; an operational data store (ODS) that feeds an enterprise data warehouse that feeds a load of domain specific data marts. Now that we have a killer infrastructure, we just have to figure what we want out of all the stuff. With the risk of being sacrilegious, I would nevertheless like to ask the following: How many actually need the data warehouse architecture that they have implemented? Yes, reports and analyses may be quicker to produce, but given the limited number of power users, IT is still largely responsible for providing the bul
