This article is part of the Issue 2 February 2012 issue of Enterprise data warehouse not dead yet

The growing interest in capturing, storing and analyzing “big data” has prompted many a data management trend spotter to predict the impending demise of the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). But as companies dive deeper into big data deployments, author Mark Twain’s famous remark about a report of his death being an exaggeration may turn out to be a more accurate commentary on the EDW’s future prospects. There’s little doubt that the flood of big data -- large amounts of both structured and unstructured information, often involving multiple data types and frequent data updates -- will require changes in many corporate data warehousing strategies. For the past two decades, IT groups, particularly in large companies, have pursued the development of a single data warehouse that serves as the central repository for all of the structured data within their organizations. Now the validity of that approach is being challenged by the meteoric increase in social media posts and a surge in non-transactional data from sources such as application and Web server logs, ... Access >>>