Taking enterprise data management to the next level

The data warehouse market has been rapidly evolving in recent years. This innovation has been largely the outcome of unleashing new product architectures that deviate from existing solutions. The limits of the “Kimball” era are showing up, and spurring many new initiatives. By incorporating novel and unprecedented architectural and technological advancements in database- and hardware technology we have made some impressive strides. Building of data warehouses is almost becoming a commodity, which several parties have managed to automate. Advancements in data warehouse (DWH) application architecture as well as the improvements in people skills and processes have been key to this trend.

Some new trends in data warehousing have been the rise of analytical databases, shared-nothing architectures and Data Vault methodology. These technological advances have taken place alongside organizational evolutions like Agile development, and automated and exploratory BI testing. There is now an increasing awareness of the strategic importance of data management and data governance which makes it immediately evident why “data as a strategic asset” and “big data” are now on the management agenda. The result of this cocktail has been amazing innovation and a field that is maturing rapidly.

The ability of data warehousing to deliver value to the business has never been greater.

Currently it is estimated that nine out of ten new DWH developments in the Netherlands are Data Vault based. The Netherlands has proven a fertile environment that fueled a meta data-driven development approach to data warehousing, and other innovations that came with this. Think hard about information (needs), let smart tools do the grunt work. Independent BI contractors, service providers, specialized BI consultancies, and product vendors (commercial as well as open source) started developing accelerators for meta data-driven data warehouses. Many of these are based on the principles of Data Vault.