Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Welcome

Welcome to my Business Intelligence Network Expert Channel!

Business intelligence (BI) no longer is a team activity within finance or marketing departments in any organization. Rather, it has become a road map to the organization’s performance and growth. Executives want to keep a pulse on the trends and behaviors of products and services, competitors and the marketplace as a whole.

All of the aforementioned activities are based upon the foundations of a data warehouse that will serve as the single integrated version of truth. In actual reality, the data within the data warehouse must be as close to real time (as defined by the organization) as possible and be available for querying. The data warehouse must also serve the purpose of being able to support data marts, exploration data warehouses, data mining and predictive analytics kinds of activities.

Where does this lead us to next? It is not building and delivering the data warehouse, but thinking and deciding on how to accommodate the multiple requirements and yet keep the data warehouse as the source of truth. What does it mean from an IT perspective to maintain a system that will have to serve multiple SLAs? How much will it cost the organization to fulfill all the needs without breaking the bank? What kind of software support and configuration management do we need to anticipate?

When these questions start arising, there is always a project or an initiative that will suffer an impact due to limitations on spending and budget for the data warehouse. Well, this is a situation of the past, at least from my perspective. With the rapid advances in hardware and storage technologies, coupled with the rise of open source database-based MPP engines that can deliver amazing performance, a new breed of technologies called the “data warehouse appliance” (official terminology as stated by Foster Hinshaw, father of the commercial data warehouse appliance) is slowly but steadily making its presence felt in data centers around the globe supporting data warehouse initiatives.

This channel from on BeyeNETWORK.com (Business Intelligence Network) is dedicated to providing a common ground for:

• Data warehouse appliances and their strengths, deployment techniques, best practices, and methodologies to integrate them into your data warehouses.
  
  
• Data warehouse architectures, the different architectural approaches to building the data warehouse, the solution architecture ecosystem for the data warehouse, the different layers and the architecture decisions across the layers.
  
  
• Finally, the third focus area high performance data warehousing. It encompasses all aspects of a data warehouse solution architecture starting with the hardware and infrastructure layers to the business intelligence user interface layers and everything in between. 

The channel focuses all of the above aspects in the data warehouse space as we all move forward.

Each month, you'll find useful insights, relevant information and constant commentary on the state of the data warehouse and business intelligence industry. I welcome your comments, suggestions or observations at krish@krishkrishnan.net. Your input is what makes this channel better for all of us.

I hope you make it your "go to" channel for practical advice and help for any BI problems, regardless of industry or environment, especially as it relates to data warehouse appliances and high performance data warehousing.