I told the head of the Enterprise Data Warehouse at a large bank, “you don’t have a data warehouse, you have 50,000 tables.” The issue is that the bank built the EDW without the necessary fundamentals in place. It wasn’t for lack of money; in fact the EDW was one of the biggest “money sinks” in the bank. The problem is that it was sitting on a sinking foundation.

One version of the truth isn’t achieved by putting all your data in one big system or one big database – that’s impossible. An enterprise data warehouse is indeed part of the solution, but it needs to be built on a solid foundation. What does a solid foundation look like? Here are five pillars for one version of the truth. (more…)