I’m going to catch up on some of my reading from over the summer. The common theme in this entry on the unabated explosion of data, even when it seems that some industries are scaling back.

First, we have a couple of articles from The Economist which IMHO is the world news magazine for nerds :-). From last June’s technology quarterly, we have two articles: "Sensors and Sensitivity" and "The Connected Car".

Does XML open up the implementation of a truly ad hoc EDW? I’m not talking about an EDW that supports ad hoc queries. I’m suggesting a fully ad hoc EDW: data model, data structures, ETL/ELT and BI tool access to end-users with no design or predefinition. The EDW points at a data source and builds a queryable subject area based only on the data available, and discovers the relationships of this new subject area to the existing metadata and tables residing in the EDW.

Scary thought? A DBA’s worst nightmare?

A long, long time ago I worked for Atari. As the story goes, they knew that they had something special when the first coin operated video game machine they installed broke down. After a panicky call from the bar owner, they found the design flaw: the coin box was jammed full with quarters from the demand. Easy to predict the video game industry was going to be a monster hit? If you were paying attention, “Yes.”

One of the first areas I explored when considering the long tail’s impact on EDW was the growth in data storage requirements. Supporting the long tail impacts the overall EDW storage requirements in two ways: width (expansion of the data model) and depth (more history). Let us look at one common subject area for all enterprises: Party (customer).

In this blog we ask the question, “How do the Long Tail concept and Black Swan events relate to and impact the Enterprise Data Warehouse and Active Enterprise Intelligence?” This blog will be a discussion platform for the Data Warehouse disruptions caused by these concepts and how to accommodate them.