CW+ Premium Content/MicroScope

Since the 1990s, organisations have gathered, processed and analysed business information in data warehouses. The term “data warehouse” was introduced to the IT mainstream by American computer scientist Bill Inmon in 1992, and the concept itself dates back further, with the founding of Teradata in 1979 and work carried out by IBM in the early 1980s. Their goal was to allow enterprises to analyse business data to improve decision making, without the need to interrogate perhaps dozens of different business databases. Since then, the technology has evolved, allowing organisations to process data at greater scale, speed and precision. But some commentators now believe the data warehouse has reached the end of its useful life. Ever greater volumes of data, along with the need to process and analyse information more quickly, including potentially in real time, are putting stress on conventional data warehouse architectures. And data warehouse suppliers face competition from the cloud. An on-premise data warehouse can cost millions of ...