Data Warehousing 2.0: the Business Perspective

Excerpted from Tapping into Unstructured Data: Integrating Unstructured Data and Textual Analytics into Business Intelligence (Prentice-Hall, 2007), by William H. Inmon and Anthony Nesavich.

Data Warehousing 2.0 is the new paradigm for data warehousing demanded by today's enlightened decision support community. It is the paradigm that focuses on the basic types of data, their structure, and how different data types relate to form a powerful store of data that meets the organization's information needs.

DW 2.0 offers some powerful benefits:

• The cost of data warehousing infrastructure is not constantly rising, as it is in the first-generation data warehouse. In first-generation DW, infrastructure costs grow exponentially as data volume grows. But with DW 2.0 the cost of the data warehouse flattens.
• The infrastructure is held together by metadata. This means that data is not easily lost, as it is in first-generation data warehouses. Take the analogy of a book in the shelves of the New York City Library. Once it is misfiled, it may be years before it is found and put back in its correct place. The same can happen with data in the first-generation data warehouse environment. But the metadata that is the backbone of DW 2.0 does not allow data to become easily lost.
• Data is quickly accessible. In a first-generation data warehouse, data is stacked upon other data, so data itself becomes an impediment to access. The result is poor performance. In a DW 2.0 environment, data is placed according to its probability of access. The result is much more efficient data access, and as a result much faster seek times.
• The need for archiving is recognized. First-generation data warehouses provide little or no data archiving; data is stored for only a relatively short period of time. But with DW 2.0 data can be kept as long as needed.
• Data warehouses attract volumes of data. The end user has to put up with the travails that come with managing and accessing large volumes of data with first-generation data warehousing. But with DW 2.0, because data is sectioned off, the end user has to deal with far less data.

All of these factors benefit the organization: significantly reduced cost, improved data access, and extended data storage duration. In short, these factors add up to the business person's ability to use data much more cost-effectively than is possible in a first-generation data warehouse.

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