Decline of the ‘Enterprise’ Data Warehouse

If you wanted to generate intelligence or other OLAPish things from large amounts of data (TBs) three years ago, you faced a terrifying prospect: You bought a server (or several large servers) costing $x00,000, paid for software from Oracle, Sybase, or IBM, and then prayed to Data Jesus that it would meet your needs for a few years.

The high-cost Enterprise Data Warehouse is no longer the only solution out there, and its significance will continue to dwindle. Hadoop represents the first radical shift in a long time in an industry that was built around “pay big or go home”.

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