Gartner analysts discuss the state of the data-warehousing market in 2011.
Analysts at Gartner are
predicting 2011 will be an inflection point for the data-warehousing
market.
As data-warehouse platforms evolve,
they will embrace analytics and support different information types; the result
will be a new era of data warehousing, according to Gartner, which just
released a report, titled "The
State of Data Warehousing in 2011." The prognostication was among the
subjects discussed this week at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in
Sydney, Australia, and will be addressed in an upcoming summit in Los
Angeles in May.
"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,"
Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a
statement. "Organizations are adding workloads with online transaction
processing (OLTP) access, and data loading has moved to intra-day-approaching continuous-loading
in many cases."
In the past year, cost
control and performance optimization became critical criteria for evaluating
data-warehousing products, according to Gartner. As a result, the market has
accepted a higher immediate cost in exchange for lower administrative and
management costs over the life of the data warehouse. This has translated to an
increase in software licensing as vendors have expanded their offerings and
marketed them as easier to implement and manage.
The data warehouse "ideal"
is changing, the analysts contend, and will give way to a new kind of warehouse
that addresses more extreme types of information assets. As a result, data
warehouse DBMS (database-management system) vendors must begin to address
numerous, new information-asset formats, or be relegated to supporting roles in
the future, according to Gartner.
"Moore's Law
increasing compute or processing capacity, advances in memory capacity and even
advances in networks and storage, [as well as] the amount of data in the world,
has reached a point that it will continue to overwhelm almost every traditional
information-management approach," Gartner analyst Mark Beyer, a co-author of
the report, told eWEEK. "Approaches such as parallel distributed processing
motifs will enable predictable, consistently performing and accurate
distributed processing. MapReduce is just the beginning. The data warehouse
will become a critical part of this new environment, but so will the platform
on which it is deployed in providing for the coordination and delivery of this
type of processing."
Gartner also
contends there is an opportunity for data-integration-tool vendors to
challenge DBMS vendors as the
market shifts from storage and access to delivery and comprehension and
makes the context depicted in metadata paramount.
"We believe there is
definitely a wider information-management environment which is expanding and
may be a composite platform of best-of-breed or something managed by a more
central engine; the market has not yet determined what to call it or if the
final form will seek a more services-style single-platform approach or a best-of-breed
composite form," Beyer said. "I stated on stage at the Gartner BI Summit in
Sydney on Feb. 22 that a coming -title fight' was coming and that the data
warehouse, DBMS and data-integration vendors were gearing up to fight it out for
control of this information-management tier."
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