An enterprise data warehouse is often the cornerstone of a business intelligence environment, but a new Forrester Research report says that can make the data store either a key enabler or a painful bottleneck in the delivery or urgent analytics to decision makers.
In a report entitled "Really Urgent Analytics: The Sweet Spot for Real-Time Data Warehousing," Forrester advises intelligence and knowledge management professionals to familiarize themselves with the various approaches for adapting a data warehouse to meet real-time requirements, and, if necessary, consider bypassing the data warehouse altogether.
Unfortunately, real-time is too often an afterthought or a bolt-on to many data-warehouse environments, which are mostly used for accessing historical data sets batch-loaded overnight, or as frequently as every few minutes, but not continuously, Forrester said. That's because most business intelligence use cases are satisfied by such scenarios.
Real-time data, on the other hand, requires a continuous flow of data, and traditional enterprise data warehouse deployments introduce slow data delivery to BI environments, the research firm said.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com