Dr Ralph Kimball, founder of the Kimball Group, believes the role of a data warehouse specialist is similar to that of a publisher. He was speaking at the Sybase-ITWeb-hosted event, "Straight Talk by Ralph Kimball", at Montecasino yesterday.
He stated that data warehousing specialists do not "make" the data, but are rather purveyors of used data.
"Part of the data warehouse mission means you collect input from a variety of sources, edit them for quality and consistency, and publish the data on a regular basis," he explained.
According to Kimball, it was first discovered in the 1980s that data could be repackaged and redistributed, with as much as 5MB being collated at a time.
In the 1990s, customer profitably began to play a larger role and volumes of between 40GB and 50GB were already being redistributed.
The 2000s saw data warehousing emerging as the ideal platform for business intelligence. "Data warehousing is the shiny, perfect, performance platform for BI," he said.
"In 2010, BI will become the platform by which to run a company as data is in the spinal cords of all users."
Kimball highlighted numerous data warehousing constraints, and using his electrical engineering background, showed delegates how these can be overcome using engineering principles.
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