Data warehousing misunderstood
A columnist for an online Oracle publication, Rick Sherman, says no data warehousing initiative should result in multiple data silos, but many often do, proving that even after 20 years since the introduction of data warehousing, the concept is still misunderstood.
The goal of data warehousing is to create "one version of the truth", says Sherman, but typically companies implement dozens of databases under the data warehousing umbrella that are not integrated with each other.
Sherman says many ERP reporting and business intelligence (BI) efforts within companies continue to be siloed because even though ERP vendors have embraced data warehousing and have built data warehousing modules as part of their product offerings, companies tend to implement these modules separately from existing data warehouses.
He says data warehousing encompasses a complete architecture and process, it`s not just having a single data warehouse. Data warehousing is the transformation of data to information, thereby enabling the business to examine its operations and performance.
Market analytics makes business connections
The placement of goods such as baby items and beer together in supermarkets may appear strange, but such seemingly strange placements may be as a result of the connections made using marketing analytic techniques, reports the Economic Times.
The report says market analytics is an extension of data warehousing, the storing of information from operational and customer interaction systems. Analysis of sales and profiles of buyers are studied and they reveal never-imagined correlations.
Market analytics uses investments made by companies on business intelligence and data warehousing and is all about high-end analysis, which helps companies earn profits by providing insights drawn from relevant data.
Data integration emerges as hot topic
Companies are starting to look at data integration from an enterprise perspective, rather than just from a data warehousing viewpoint, according to a b-eye-network article.
The article says data integration is a hot topic, but one fraught with confusion that The Data Warehousing Institute in the US is seeking to dispel by conducting an in-depth study of the subject.
The study report is to be published in October and will focus on building enterprise data integration architecture, looking specifically at bringing together three data integration technologies: extract transformation and load (ETL); enterprise information integration (EII); and enterprise application integration (EAI).
Preliminary results of the study show that organisations are beginning to understand that ETL, EAI and EII need to be brought together to form a cohesive data integration environment.
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