Gartner Charts Nine Key Data Warehousing Trends for CIOs

Data warehouse will remain a key element of the IT infrastructure. As demand for business intelligence (BI) and category of business analytics increases, flexible designs and strategies will become important for CIOs, according to Gartner, an independent research firm.

“The data warehouse remains one of the largest — if not the largest — information repository in the enterprise,” said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert), in a statement.

“Only by being aware of the key market trends and how emerging technology solutions will blend with proven practices can the CIO avoid budget waste through 'misdirection' by the data warehouse management and delivery team,” Beyer added.

In this aspect, CIOs need to understand nine key trends in data warehousing. They should know the impact of the cost-benefit balance of technology deployed to deliver business analytics value during 2011 and 2012.

First, advanced functionality for hardware management of input/output (I/O), disk storage and CPU/memory balancing are now included as a matter of course in data-warehouse-capable platforms, according to Gartner.

Simplicity is the main reason for buying an appliance. The vendor builds and certifies the configuration, balancing hardware, software and services for a predictable performance.

Gartner recommends that the proof of concepts (POCs) obtained during the selection phase of the data warehouse database management system (DBMS) use the real source-system extracted data (SSED) from the operational systems while deploying data warehouse.Warehouses offering all six workloads need to be assessed for predictability of mixed workload performance.

Data marts can be used to optimize the data warehouse by offloading part of the workload to the data mart. This will ensure better performance to the warehousing environment.

Several vendors may be changing the pricing model for the software from a more traditional per-user or per-core model to a price based on the volume of data loaded into the database.

Business intelligence (BI) solutions will emerge and will leverage in-memory DMBSs with superior-performing products and will become acquisition targets for top vendors.

In 2011, data warehouse as a service will come in two flavors — software as a service (SaaS (News - Alert)) and outsourced data warehouses.

Open-source DBMSs will be used in both experimental and more formalized approaches for optimizing specifically for data warehousing.

In another recent study, Gartner found that social media’s penetration will totally change the customer relationship management (CRM) landscape in the years immediately following 2011.