CONFUSING TERMINOLOGY: PT 2 – Data Warehousing
July 3, 2012 by Thoughts from the Dataspace
Filed under Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Latest
With all due respect to Bill Inmon, the father of data warehousing (Dad?), isn’t the very term Data Warehousing confusing to everyone but the folks who build data warehouses?
Really, when you tell people that you work in data warehousing don’t they usually respond that they know all about data centers? In other words, the term data warehouse just doesn’t make sense for what we do. Perhaps we should go to something less flashy but more accurate like, “Reporting Databases”? Or, perhaps, something like, “subject oriented, integrated, non volatile, time variant collections of data in support of management decisions?*”
OK, maybe not. But, in the end, don’t sell your sponsors on the terminology, sell them on what the technologies will allow them to do.
* Roughly, Bill Inmon’s original definition of a data warehouse
