On the subject of Data Warehouses, Data Cubes & OLAP....

On the subject of Data Warehouses, Data Cubes & OLAP….

        I would like to speak frankly about Data Warehouses, Data Cubes and OLAP (on-line analytical processing). Has it dawned on anyone else that these buzz words were created by some geek who decided to take a stab at marketing? Knowing that to the backwoods manager who knows little of technology that new innovative names for old concepts would help to sale their products.

        I mean seriously, what is the story here? In a nut shell, and please stop me if you disagree, but isn’t a data warehouse simply a database? Can’t you do everything on a conventional database like SQL Server, Oracle or DB2 that you can do on these new proprietary Data Warehouse constructs? I mean who are they trying to fool?

        Take a look, for instance, at Data Cubes. Who hasn’t noticed the striking similarity between data cubes and views used in all the more robust databases? Also, what about OLAP? OLAP is nothing more than a report generator. There’s nothing you can do with these million dollar price tagged Data Warehouse total solution packages that I can’t do with SQL Server, Oracle or DB2…for that matter Microsoft Access.

        As an example some sales people for Metadata Corporation has the Vice President of I.T. in Nashville, for Healthspring, sold on their total solution data respository which is such a scam. All they had to do was throw a couple of buzzwords at him and they have him hypnotized.

Personally, I feel that these kinds of marketing practices undermine our industry. It helps to unravel what little standards or consistency we have. What do you guys think?

Stuart Received on Tue Oct 14 2003 - 17:00:42 CEST