The Business Intelligence Blog

Is building an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) the best path to business intelligence (BI)? It’s a perennially vexing question that — thanks to a couple of recent trends in BI and data warehousing (DW) — has taken on new life.

The value of the full-fledged EDW seems unassailable. Over the last half-decade, however, some of the biggest EDW champions have moderated their stances, such that they now both countenance the existence of alternatives and, under certain very special conditions, are even willing to admit they’re useful. The result is that although the EDW is still seen as the Holy Grail of data warehousing, departmental (and even enterprise) data marts are now countenanced as well.

Active EDW giant Teradata Inc. is the foremost case in point, but other players — including relative newcomer Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), which is in the high-end DW segment (by its acquisition of Knightsbridge Solutions) and markets Neoview, a DW appliance-like offering — are staking out similar ground. (In addition to Neoview, HP also partners with both Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. to market appliances in the 1 to 32 TB range.)

Interesting debate on TDWI.

From Fox Business-

Teradata Corporation, the leader in enterprise data warehousing, announced today that it was selected by Caterpillar, the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines and industrial gas turbines, to supply licensed software applications and enterprise data warehouse services to support Caterpillar’s global rollout of SAP, a program supporting business information management.

Caterpillar purchased Teradata’s market-leading analytical software running on a LINUX-based three-node 5500H server, plus an additional hot standby node and six terabytes of storage capacity.