One thing that might be changing is the idea of “real time” data warehousing. “Right time” is a better phrase, but even that seems too ambiguous. Certainly SOA is the way to go for real-time reporting and analysis (which is often the arena for managers stuck in their departmental islands in need of cross business process reports).

I disagree with you on this point: “Data warehouses still have a place in BI as way of facilitating the delivery of quality data to the reporting layer”. While reporting is a huge part of presentation, I have worked on nothing but intense analytic projects designed to present upper management with competitive advantage. Usually this is in the form of complex applications, scoring engines, and the like.

I have difficulty even imagining the possibilities but if it becomes mainstream in say, 10 years, then it’s not widespread storing of photos I’m worried about: it’s full on HD video!

Worse: how do we index and x-ref all that so it can be queried usefully and come back in a usable time? Nope, classic indexing is not viable, we just can’t say “go build an index on those 3HB of videos”: our children will be able to use the index at current CPU and sort algorithm speeds…

I think Jim Gray’s “Personal Petabyte” is right on schedule. Once more he is proven right: we have to prebuild the catalogues and indexes and then just populate them as needed. So much for “no need for data modelling and logical db design”.

Darn, why did he have to go sailing!…

Maybe, we should really be speaking of evolution – DWs will change, become less monolithic, more federated, and support more types of data for query (such as image, free text – but getting the dimensionality of a photo defined is going to be a challenge!) And as ever the problem for people like us is to move shed loads of data quickly enough to be useful, and that is always going to be down database infrastructure and not some whizzy web query tool thing

Does anyone honestly believe the acronym soup that characterizes the web2 architecture is seriously going to replace ANYTHING?

Because I have yet to see proof it even works, let alone replace anything….