December 2007 Archives

Enterprises must integrate data in a number of operational systems. But how should they do it? There are two technical approaches: ETL or Federate. Michael Stonebraker discusses the pros and cons of each approach in regards to data element "heat," indexing, resource management, complexity of schema change, contention, timeliness, and mapping, concluding that the ETL approach makes sense in most cases. Continue reading "To ETL or federate ... that is the question" »

Consolidation within the Business Intelligence (BI) market continues. After more than a dozen acquisitions made by Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion over the past few years, these BI tools/analytics industry leaders were themselves snapped up in a matter of months by SAP, IBM, and Oracle respectively. But economies of scale enabled by consolidation is just one of the two primary drivers of the new economics of BI. Jerry Held explains how the other driver is economies of innovation that is a result of the continuing stream of new entrants. Continue reading "The new economics of the BI market" »