This week I ask the question "What BI practices are taken for granted today, but will be viewed as prehistoric in the next century?" and offer up some food for thought on some answers -- all speculation.
1.
People will one day look back at that weird time when BI applications actually waited for data as much as a whole day. They even waited until the weekend for those things called cubes and summary tables to get built.
In the next century, the data will spontaneously materialize in all the places where it is needed as soon as it is created, along with the generation of all of the derived and summary data based on that data. That is, if these things are actually necessary based on answer 2.
2.
Our BI descendants, and possibly many of us, will have a hearty laugh at us in 2012 when they read about how we built summary tables, indexes, cubes, derived data and all other manner of non-atomic data, because our queries did not perform well enough with just the atomic data tossed into a data warehouse, and we had to pre-guess how the data was going to be used by summarizing, indexing, deriving, and building cubes with pre-fashioned dimensions.
Metadata layers to atomic data combined with well-performing systems will facilitate future data warehouse interactions. But wait -- a data warehouse -- what was that?
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This was first published in July 2002