People often use the end of a decade to say goodbye to trends that have played themselves out, or good riddance to things that have long since passed their cultural expiration dates. I like to use the beginnings of decades for that same purpose. What, we should ask ourselves, is not likely to last beyond the close of this new ten-year cycle?
In data warehousing, the most likely casualty of the Teens will be the very notion of a data warehouse. You can tell that a concept is on its last legs when its proponents spend more time on the defense, fighting definitional trench wars, than evolving it in useful new directions. Here’s a perfect case in point:a recent article by Bill Inmon, self-described “father of the data warehouse,” where he takes pains to specify what is not a data warehouse. Apparently, many of the approaches that we normally implement in our data warehousing architectures—such as subject-specific data marts, dimensional data structures, federated architectures, and real-time data integration—don’t pass muster in Inmon’s way of looking at things. Though he didn’t mention hybrid row-columnar and in-memory databases by name, one suspects that Inmon has a similarly jaundiced view of these leading-edge data warehousing technologies.
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