Analytic Warehousing
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: Market Guide
We have long been concerned that the data
warehousing market is treated as if it was homogeneous,
with all vendors potentially tackling
all warehousing issues. This is very far
from the truth: for example, some products
are specifically focused on supporting analytics
while others are targeted at enterprise data
warehouses. Similarly, some suppliers target
the low end of the market, measured in gigabytes
or perhaps a few terabytes, while others
concentrate on implementations with tens or
hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes. Trying
to compare all of these offerings within
a single paradigm makes no sense. We have
therefore elected to break the market down in
terms of both functionality (analytic marts and
warehouses on the one hand, and enterprise
data warehouses on the other) and, in the case
of the former: scale (small, medium and large).
We have not distinguished in scale terms
across enterprise data warehouses because
the two tend to go hand in hand. Each of these
four sub-market examinations is available as
an individual paper in its own right, but each
refers back to this one as its foundation document
in which we discuss market requirements
and vendors.