2011 an 'Inflection Point' for Data Warehouse, Says Gartner

Nine Key Data Warehousing Trends for the CIO in 2011 and 2012

Optimization, flexible designs and alternative strategies will become more important as the demand for BI and business analytics increases.

As business intelligence changes, the data warehouse needs to change with it. And it is changing, according to a new Gartner report titled "The State of Data Warehousing in 2011."

In 2011, we are seeing data-warehouse platforms evolve from an information store supporting traditional business intelligence platforms to a broader analytics infrastructure supporting operational analytics, corporate performance management and other new applications and uses, such as operational BI and performance management.

Vendors must tweak their data warehouse platforms to take advantage of advances in computing and processing capacity. Dealing with growing volumes of data is a continuing challenge. Gartner is predicting 2011 will be an "inflection point" for the data warehouse.

BI appears to be at an inflection point as well, judging by remarks from SAP's Timo Elliott at this week's ITWeb BI Summit in South Africa. Not surprisingly, considering SAP's strategic direction for BI, Elliott touted in-memory technologies, which he said "provides efficient data storage in much less space than traditional row-based databases."

In another report titled "Data Warehousing Trends for the CIO, 2011-2012," Gartner says in-memory technologies "exhibit extremely fast query response and data commit times and introduce a higher probability that analytics and transactional systems can share the same database."

Some of the other trends mentioned in the report:

• Growing interest in data warehouse appliances, driven by a desire for simplicity and speed. Forrester Research also mentions this trend, in a data warehouse report of its own. As a SearchDataManagement.com article notes, data warehouse heavyweights IBM-Netezza and Teradata introduced solutions that combine their primary data warehouse appliance platforms with preconfigured data models and tools for BI, advanced analytics and data quality. And Oracle just rolled out its Financial Services Data Warehouse, a preconfigured bundle of software geared toward users in the financial services industry and certified to run on Oracle's Exadata hardware platform.
• Mixed workloads. Data warehouses increasingly will deliver a combination of different workloads, says Gartner. Organizations must plan for this now, or risk paying higher administration costs as data volumes and added workloads grow over time.
• Resurgence of data marts, which Gartner says can help optimize the data warehouse by taking over some workloads.

For the entire list of trends, check out the IT Business Edge slideshow.