Informatica Perspectives

For anyone in the integration business, the notion that data silos are bad is deeply engrained in the psyche.  It's plain common sense that having multiple copies of data in different places makes it a lot harder to run your business in a consistent, coherent manner.  But we keep committing the same sins over and over again– often with the very technologies that promise to solve the data fragmentation problem—SOA, data warehousing, MDM, to name a few.

First we moved off mainframes to distributed systems.  Of course, no one would doubt that the benefits in terms of access to key business data and application functionality more than outweighed the costs of silo proliferation.  At least in the client/server era, the number of silos was still somewhat manageable.

But then the internet came along, and everyone rushed to get the latest internet/web application up and running, while at best paying lip service to a cohesive enterprise architecture.  As we later learned, this lead to a huge proliferation of new systems and data silos at most companies.  [Read more]

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. [Read more]