The Business Intelligence Blog

Bill Inmon, the father of Data Warehousing, is taking Data Warehousing to its next step by defining the DW 2.0. In a path breaking article on DM review, DW 2.0 – Architecture for the Next Generation of Data Warehousing, he outlines the general guidelines for streamlining data that makes it a next generation Data Warehouse. One of the prime reasons stated for this movement from the original DW concept was the growth and acceptance of Business Intelligence in the business world. As enterprises see the worth of BI systems as a fuelling factor for the future plans, many of them started embracing BI concepts. And with wide acceptance comes issues. As more and more data warehousing projects went live, the concept itself stay put.

As analysts saw more and more data integration issues, the need to evolve Data Warehousing to the next paradigm became a sort of compulsion. Bill Inmon remarks in his interview to DM Review’s editor Jim Ericson, “There are two reasons for DW 2.0 – the first is for the integrity of the definition because I feel there are too many definitions floating around. The second reason is the need for a vision for the future of data warehousing, which I believe a lot of people in the industry have wrong. It came from confusion and from vendors trying to sell products. There were people building transactional systems they were calling a data warehouse; people building federated versions of a data warehouse; people building data marts that they were calling a data warehouse. Those are just some of the renditions.”

With DW 2.0, the data gets more structured and more reportable. As the jargon, near real-time operational information, gets more and more hyped, the need to create OLAP reports out of transactional data becomes inevitable. So even as this was the intention of Data Warehousing when it was first defined, Bill’s DW 2.0 takes into account this near real-time transactional information and tries to structure this so as to help the Data Warehouse report out of this. With DW 2.0, even without an Operational Data Store you could report from your Data Warehouse and from your OLTP system.

Even if you don’t plan to develop or deploy DW 2.0 in the near future, this DW 2.0 article and this interview with Bill on the need to create DW are a must read to make sure you don’t feel left behind.

More Reading – Bill Inmon’s DW 2.0 Whitepaper [requires registration]