Database Reference
In-Depth Information
expertise engaged to maximize the investment that even with the best
resources is unlikely to continue to achieve linear performance benefits. Can
the existing team even maintain it? Can they be trained, or will experts or
consultants be required to support and tune the system? These are all open
questions that can be answered only by you and your team.
However, what we can say is that we have a system architecture that costs
disproportionately more to buy and even more to maintain as it grows.
Hardly a scalable model. Clearly, then, we need to look at alternatives (and
preferably before issues such as cost force us to).
Business Challenges
In case you hadn't noticed, it's a tough world out there. Competition is rife.
The consequences of competition often have brutal outcomes. Failure to
change has seen established businesses go to the wall while other new, more
dynamic, businesses continue to rise at unparalleled rates. We must adapt
to the new economic climate, embracing opportunities and adapting rapidly
as business models become stale.
As a result of this ruthless competition, my kids will never know the “joy” of
a trip to Blockbusters to rent the latest movie. How many trips did you make
only to find they've sold out or gone out of business? My children use online
services like Netflix or Lovefilm instead. The thought of going to a shop to
rent a movie seems absurd to them. Therefore, to stay ahead, businesses are
looking at their data to provide them with genuinely new insights.
The buzz at the moment surrounds predictive analytics. Users want the
ability to project and forecast more accurately and look for competitive
advantages through new data “products.” It's this desire to get into the
business of the unknown unknowns that has transformed application
architectures and, in turn, data warehouses.
This next section looks at the challenges that businesses face when trying to
make informed decisions.
Data Sprawl
Onceuponatime,thisusedtobeknownasSQLsprawl.However,thereality
is that this data is not constrained to disparate databases and also is not
limited to the enterprise systems either. Historically, we used to just worry
about stovepipe applications.
