Theory
The term Data Warehouse was coined by Bill Inmon in 1990, which he defined in the following way: "A warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process". He defined the terms in the sentence as follows:
Subject Oriented:
Data that gives information about a particular subject instead of about a company's ongoing operations.
Integrated:
Data that is gathered into the data warehouse from a variety of sources and merged into a coherent whole.
Time-variant:
All data in the data warehouse is identified with a particular time period.
Non-volatile
Data is stable in a data warehouse. More data is added but data is never removed. This enables management to gain a consistent picture of the business.
Reality
How closely does your BW design conform to the definition of DW? Does anyone think this definition is not relevant today or not relevant to BW? If so, why?
New Technologies and Tools
What concerns me is the fact (or is this just my opinion?) that our foundation(BW design) is not strong. Instead of discussing ways to correct it, we mostly discuss new technologies such as in-memory databases and new tools such as BOBJ. We don't even discuss the relevance of Basis, DB, O/S, SAN, Network etc while discussing BOBJ. I observed the reference to Basis knowledge-while discussing Business Objects- in this only blog: Is Business Objects for SAP BW really different?. The author of this blog Joseph Caruso states:
"....SAP is adamant that “Business Objects for SAP is different”. Our staff attended training and workshops. In most cases, SAP tells us that Business Objects for SAP BW requires significant SAP Basis knowledge and should be tightly coupled with SAP BW...".
Assuming BW design is flawed in most cases-I make this assumption based on the observations I made reading other blogs in sdn and my own experiences-, how new tools such as BOBJ are going to support the business in Decision-Making process? Why we don't even discuss the relevance of DB, O/S, SAN, Network etc while discussing BW and/or Business Objects?
