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Data Warehousing Appliances – Fad or Future?
 David M Walker  Data Management & Warehousing  December 2006 
Despite all the hype from vendors the basics of data warehousing have remainedfundamentally unchanged – extract data from multiple source systems, reformat theinformation into an easy to query structure, load it into a dedicated database and addan effective user interface to allow users to query the information. The cost of thisenvironment is substantial and directly relates to the complexity of the Extract,Transform Load (ETL) process and the volume of data held in the system.The complexity of the ETL process has two cost impacts: the first is in the cost of theinitial design and development and is reasonably well understood. The second is thecost of changes over the lifetime of the system, for example if an organisation havefour source systems and each system under goes a change once a quarter then the datawarehouse support team have to modify and test an interface every three weeks, andall this without any changes in the users requirements. The volume of data also hitsthe bottom line, not only in the cost of storage but in the size and (more expensive)skills of team required to support it, especially as data explosion forces the business toenter the very large database arena where load time and user query performance arecritical.Against this background it is unsurprising that vendors are looking to compete byreducing storage, improving query times and simplify administration. Oracle havetaken steps to enhance their core database engine with features that improve each of these areas and continue to develop their strategy, however more and more is builtinto the core of its flagship general purpose engine resulting in software that has manyfeatures not needed by a specific application. Sybase have taken the more radical stepof creating an entirely new database engine called Sybase IQ that does away withsome of the limitations required of a general purpose engine to produce a solution thatis both much faster in load and user query performance and far more efficient in itsdisk usage than other general purpose databases.Into this market enters the data warehousing appliance vendors, a breed of dedicatedintegrated hardware and software solution designed to solve a business’ datawarehousing woes. Such systems use low cost commodity components in largevolumes with dedicated business intelligence engines to deliver radically faster loadtimes whilst at the same time reducing the query times and simplifying the systemsadministration process.The first hurdle for many organisations is that data warehousing appliances are proprietary going against a corporate policy of open systems to allow technology re-use, however a solution built on one of the current market leading platforms,Terradata, is no less so. In fact Terradata can be considered one of the original datawarehouse appliances and it is the use of the low-cost commodity components and theability to achieve massive parallelism by the new-comers that differentiates them.
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