Buzzword: “Data Warehouse”

I almost didn’t bother with this one, since it’s almost too generic now to be useful, but it does deserve a few sentences if nothing more than to pay respects.  (Wikipedia has a good definition and some of the history around the term if you want background.)

Nowadays, I find that the term is hardly used anymore, probably because of the proliferation of more specific terms that describe the individual components (e.g., ETL, data quality, EII).  I think another reason is the move to more real-time analytics, and the term “data warehouse” conjures up visions of static information sitting in an Oracle (or Teradata) database. 

Ten years ago, all you had to do was say I’m building a “data warehouse” and most people knew what you were talking about.  Now, it could mean a dozen different things, which makes communicating more difficult.  It would be nice to have all of this wrapped up into one nice term that everyone can agree upon, but I doubt that’s going to happen, which is actually a good thing.  It means that people realize (both business and technical) that data driven solutions are not one-size fits all, and that there are a myriad of implementation options available.

The “Data Warehouse” isn’t dead, it just lives on in it’s numerous children and grandchildren.

This entry was posted on 21. May 2008 at 10:38 and is filed under Industry Buzzwords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.