Beyond Data Lakes and Data Warehousing

The story begins with Decision Support which was the old trendy term which is being replaced by the new trendy term Business Intelligence (BI) and the even newer and trendier Analytics. Regardless of the term, the idea was that companies needed to make better decisions based on the data stored in their various operational systems and databases. So two guys from IBM came up with the idea of the Data Warehouse in the late 1980s. Their concept was to consolidate data from the various systems and databases into a single database, that is, a Data Warehouse, to serve as the source for creating analytics and reporting, that is, delivering decision support. It was a great idea and it worked! It was the first real step towards data integration because it solved the problem of isolated and heterogenous data stores, commonly referred to as data silos, by providing a single database for reporting and analysis. Some work was involved though.