Madan Sheina, who is one of the smarter analysts out there, has written an excellent piece in Computer Business Review on an old hobby horse of mine: data warehouses that are unnecessarily large. I won’t rehash the arguments that are made in the article here (in which Madan is kind enough to quote me) as you can read it for yourself but you can be sure that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to making sense of your business peformance: indeed the opposite is usually true.
Giant data warehouses certainly benefit storage vendors, hardware vendors, consultants who build and tune them and DBAs, who love to discuss their largest database as if is was a proxy for their, er, masculinity (apologies to those female DBAs out there, but you know what I mean; it is good for your resume to have worked on very large databases). The trouble is that high volumes of data make it harder to quickly analyse data in a meaninfgul way, and in most cases this sort of data warehouse elephantitis can be avoided by careful consideration of the use cases,probably saving a lot of money to boot. Of course that would involve IT people actually talking to he business users, I won’t be holding my breath for this more thoughtful approach to take off as a trend. Well done Madan for another thoughtful article.