Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing have undergone a significant evolution in the past 10 years. There was a time when BI was a standalone, isolated world of time-dated, historical snapshots of data for analytics. BI implementers extracted all the data they wanted from the operational environment, and then disappeared with it into a world of
their own.
Tactical and strategic analyses were performed on daily, weekly, and perhaps monthly snapshots of data. Query performance was important but not a critical factor in the environment’s success. The audience was limited to business analysts and highly technical statisticians and researchers. The most difficult problem faced by the implementers was
the ability to give these users flexibility in terms of handling unplanned or unusual queries.
Then along came the notion of operational BI. While it seemed innocent enough – just another form of BI – operational BI has turned out to be a major disruptive force in BI environments today. Perhaps it can best be summed up in one characteristic: Operational BI must actively support operational decision making.
What does this mean to your existing data warehouse environment? Plenty! Operational BI has put significant and increasing pressures on the BI environment to meet these new business requirements. This Intelligent Solutions white paper by Claudia Imhoff discusses the pressures and their impact on data warehouse environments. We end the paper will suggestions on how to make your infrastructure more “dynamic” and future-proof.
