By James Kobielus

Oracle saved its most significant new product announcement for the third day of OpenWorld.

In classic marketing fashion, the vendor teased the thousands of attendees for days, prominently touting some exciting, mysterious new initiative by the quasi-algebraic designator "X." And the OpenWorld agenda showed that this earth-shattering announcement was to be delivered in mid-afternoon from the Moscone Center main stage by none other than Mr. Larry Ellison, in conjunction with HP honchos Mark Hurd and Ann Livermore.

By James Kobielus

Few enterprise data warehousing (EDW) professionals regard the key rival approach--data federation--to be a best practice. Usually, the reasons for this disdain are valid, such as the fact that federated environments are not optimized for heavy-hitting data matching, merging, transformation and cleansing, all of which are essential functions to deliver a "single version of the truth" for business intelligence (BI).

By James Kobielus

Databases are evolving faster than ever. Long regarded as an essential but slightly boring centerpiece of the enterprise information management infrastructure, the database is becoming more fluid and adaptive in architecture in order to keep pace with an online world that's becoming virtualized at every level.

By James Kobielus

BI is essentially a set of best practices for building models to answer business questions. However, today's BI best practices may be suboptimal for many enterprises' decision-support requirements.

For most users, BI is a journey that's been modeled and mapped out in advance by others, following a well-marked path through vast data sets. Data models, which must often be pre-built by specialists, generate or shape the design of such key BI artifacts as queries, reports, and dashboards. Essentially, every BI application is some data modeler's prediction of the types of questions that users will want to ask of the underlying data marts. Sometimes, those predictions are little more than an educated guess -- and are not always on the mark.

By James Kobielus

Teradata has taken the big plunge. Yesterday, as long rumored, it launched the first commercial solutions in its broad portfolio to be explicitly positioned as data warehousing (DW) appliances. Specifically, it announced the new Teradata 550P, Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550 platforms, which join the established Teradata 5500 platform in the vendor's market-leading enterprise data warehousing (EDW) solution family.