Informatica Perspectives

Okay, so the band Coldplay will never release a song by that title (and I probably wouldn't want to hear it if they did.)  But it would be timely, because despite certain rumors to the contrary, data warehousing is thriving.

We weren't supposed to need data warehousing in an era of SOA/data services, data federation and other new-fangled technologies.  Data warehousing was old-fashioned and tired and a bit boring.  But the need for data warehousing solutions just continues to grow– companies aren't getting less data, and their environments aren't getting simpler.  The discipline of integrating data from multiple systems and conforming it to a common structure so that is can be analyzed and used for business intelligence and reporting is still invaluable.  This is not to say that the new technologies don't play a role– they can greatly enhance data warehousing by providing more real-time data and new ways of delivering data where it's needed.

In fact, there's lots of talk about DW 2.0, active data warehousing and enterprise data warehouses– all new takes on what could be a rather staid corner of IT.  See Joe McKendrick's posting, where he takes a stab at defining DW 2.0.

And more and more, I have seen the managers responsible for data warehousing getting broader responsibility within the organization, instead of being relegated to a backwater.  Why the step up?  Because organizations are investing in enterprise business intelligence initiatives in order to get a better handle on their business.  The data warehouse leads play a key role in BI success.  Also, MDM (master data management) is a hot topic at a lot of firms.  It's often a natural progression for the data warehousing team to tackle MDM– they've already wrestled with a lot of the issues in the source systems, and the challenges of melding all that data together.  Although I agree with Colin White that MDM should be kept separate from the BI environment, the skills sets can be readily leveraged across both.

Really, it's a pretty good time to be in data warehousing– the problem is hard, and if you have the knowledge and skills to solve it, you should be in good stead.