Datasheet

17
Chapter 1: What’s in a Data Warehouse?
of their product, and in 1986, Fortune magazine named Teradata Product of
the Year. Teradata, still in existence today, built the first data warehousing
appliance — a combination of hardware and software to solve the data ware-
housing needs of many. Other companies began to formulate their strategies,
as well.
In 1988, Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy of IBM Ireland introduced the term
business data warehouse as a key component of the EBIS (Europe/Middle
East/Africa Business Information System). EBIS was defined as a compre-
hensive architecture aimed at providing a cross-functional business informa-
tion system that’s easy to use and has the flexibility to change while the
business environment develops, even at a rapid rate. The flexibility and
cross-functional support are a result of the relational database technology on
which the EBIS system is based. When describing the business data ware-
house, they articulated the need to “ease access to the data and to achieve a
coherent framework for such access, it is vital that all the data reside in a
single logical repository.”
Additionally, Ralph Kimball founded Red Brick Systems in 1986. Red Brick
began to emerge as a visionary software company by discussing how to
improve data access. They were promoting a specialized relational database
platform which enabled large performance gains for complex ad-hoc queries.
Often, they could prove performance over ten times that of other vendor
databases of the time. The key to Red Brick’s technology was indexes — a
software answer to Teradata’s hardware-based solution. These indexes
where technical solutions to the key manners in which users described the
data within a data warehouse — customers, products, demographics, and
so on.
In short, the 1980s were the birth place of data warehousing innovation.
The 1990s — the adolescent
During the 1990s, disco made a comeback. At the beginning of the decade,
some 20 years after computing went mainstream, business computer users
were still no closer to being able to use the trillions of bytes of data locked
away in databases all over the place to make better business decisions.
The original group of enterprising, forward-thinking people had retired (or
perhaps switched to doing Web site development). Using the time-honored
concept of “something old, something new” (the “something borrowed,
something blue” part doesn’t quite fit), a new approach to solving the
islands-of-data problem surfaced. If the 1980s approach of reaching out and
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