Twenty Years On, We came up together in this industry in the early 1990s, as pointy-headed advocates of star schema design, trained by the deity himself, Ralph Kimball. Back then, it was a simpler world...big iron, big DBMS, hand-coded ETL, star schema, a thousand rinky-dink query tools. Mostly, conversation was dominated by ETL and schema design. “There will never be a decisional database larger than 10 GB...” Twenty years on, we find ourselves with opposing view on what is either the biggest con, or the biggest sea-change, in our data warehousing odyssey. Question: Is the big data revolution big, or a revolution? Question: do we have to change? and if so, how? Not a round table. A slugfest....Regular Programming Is Suspended. Compromise. You take the blue pill. The story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I am offering is the truth:nothing more. This change has been in process for more than a decade. Social media leads the way, but we’re all affected. Hype - For most companies, data remains an asset, but not a factor in the production of its products or services. Few companies transformed. No quantification of benefits, right now. Leverage? Maybe. No company escapes. Text, social, sensors, streaming -- the instrumentation of the real world transforms company decision-making processes. Few companies transformed. No quantification of benefits, right now. Leverage? Maybe. Merchant DBMSs - Increasingly irrelevant. We’ve been over-structured and under-resourced for 20 years. CSV is still the international standard. Will rise to the challenge. We have two generations of analysts trained to feed using these tools. Query, Reporting & Dashboarding Tools - Ineffective, now and in the future. Can’t do real-time, can’t visualize large data sets, can’t support discovery and exploration. Will rise to the challenge. We have two generations of analysts trained to feed using these tools. The Commodity Hardware Revolution & Radical Scale-Out - The new topology. Cheap compute, unintelligent direct-attach storage and free comms make large scale-out grids the future. Structured Query Language - Tried-and-True. Powerful, expressive language for complex analytical problems. That’s why the noSQL vendors reinvent it all the time. The Cloud - We all go there.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 13:10:08 +0000
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