The Evolving Role of the Enterprise Data Warehouse in the Era of Big Data Analytics

Simple analysis of all the data trumps sophisticated analysis of some of the data. 23 Executive Summary In this white paper, we describe the rapidly evolving landscape for designing an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to support business analytics in the era of "big data. " We describe the scope and challenges of building and evolving a very stable and successful EDW architecture to meet new business requirements. These include extreme integration, semi-and un-structured data sources, petabytes of behavioral and image data accessed through MapReduce/Hadoop as well as massively parallel relational databases, and then structuring the EDW to support advanced analytics. This paper provides detailed guidance for designing and administering the necessary processes for deployment. This white paper has been written in response to a lack of specific guidance in the industry as to how the EDW needs to respond to the big data analytics challenge, and what necessary design elements are needed to support these new requirements. Ralph Kimball founded the Kimball Group. Since the mid 1980s, he has been the data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) industry's thought leader on the dimensional approach and trained more than 10,000 IT professionals. The Kimball Group is the source for dimensional DW/BI consulting and education, consistent with our best-selling Toolkit book series, Design Tips, and award-winning articles. Visit www.kimballgroup.com for more information.