Informatica Perspectives

For years, the data warehousing space had been fairly steady and predictable. Data warehouses grew by terabytes over terabytes, addressing a critical need to collect and analyze data to discover patterns in customer behavior and other business trends. However, data warehouses have also been notoriously expensive and complex to implement in their early stages, requiring major corporate budget initiatives.

Now, revolutionary forces are aligning and reshaping the world of enterprise data warehousing as we know it. [Read more]

Flipping around traditional ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) on its head is not a new practice.  ELT (Extract-Load-Transform), where processing is handled in the database, instead of the ETL server, has been proven to enhance performance in many types of data warehousing deployments.

For example, Oi, a leading telecom provider in Brazil, implemented an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) consolidating information on 36 million customers, speeding response time to customer requests.  The right-time EDW also enabled Oi to rapidly launch a successful new service offering, which made it easier for customers to recharge their pre-paid accounts for telecom service.

By implementing ELT with Informatica’s pushdown optimization capabilities for this Teradata data warehouse, Oi accelerated its data warehousing loading process two-fold.  This has led to even more timely updates of Oi’s customer information, while lowering costs.
[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]

As Don noted in his post “Why the “E” in EDW (Enterprise Data Warehousing)?” many companies have successfully implemented Enterprise Data Warehousing, producing great business ROI. Don talked about how the industry has evolved to better appreciate EDW.

While consulting to companies on data warehousing solutions I’ve noticed that companies not effectively deploying EDW fall into two camps:

• No real data warehousing effort. Instead they rely on their business applications to provide reporting and analysis capabilities.
• A central data warehouse has been created. But they conduct most analysis using databases (maybe called data marts) or data shadow systems created separately from the central DW.

If you are in either camp it may finally be time for you to pursue enterprise data warehousing.
[Read more]