Don’t Become a One-trick Architect

We are near the dawn of a new workload: BigData. While some people say that “it is always darkest just before the dawn”. I beg to differ: I think it is darkest just before it goes pitch black.  Have a cup of wakeup coffee, get your eyes adjusted to the new light, and to flying blind a bit, because the next couple of years are going to be really interesting.

In this post, I will be sharing my views on where we have been and a bit about where we are heading in the enterprise architecture space. I will say in advance that my opinions on BigData are just crystalizing, and it is most likely that I will be adjusting them and changing my mind.

The Big Picture – EDW/DW architecture

Now that the cat is out of the bag on the Kimball forum, I figured it would be a good idea to present the full architecture that I will be arguing for. I was hoping to build up to it slowly, by establishing each premise on its own before moving on to the conclusion.

But perhaps it is better to start from the conclusion and then work my way down to the premises and show each one in turn.

Microsoft Announces Plans to Introduce Hadoop Interoperability

For those of you who have not yet seen it, Microsoft recently announced that they will be looking at Hadoop connectivity to the database stack:

• Parallel Data Warehouse News and Hadoop Interoperability Plans

Some of you may have wondered why I have not yet mentioned the BigData movement as part of my DW articles. In my defense I will say that this a big trend, something I had to give a lot of thought to position correctly. Before I can talk more about how it fits into the full DW/BI architecture – I have to argue a bit more for my warehousing approach.

I can reveal that I see traditional data warehousing (especially dimensional modeling) and BigData compliment each other in a way that solves some of the common complaints of warehouse builders across the world. I hope you will find my thoughts on BigData fit nicely into the picture I will be painting of the warehousing world going forward in this blog.