STANDING ARMIES

STANDING ARMIES

“Standing armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

By W H Inmon

Data warehouse was not understood or supported by the big technical giants from the beginning. IBM went out of its way to deride data warehouse. Many years ago IBM sponsored an executive seminar which traveled across the US featuring Ted Codd discussing the idiocy of data warehouse and Bill Inmon. I could always tell which city the seminar had been given because the next day people who had attended the seminar called me on the phone and told me all about it. IBM was telling people how great DB2 was going to be. You didn’t need a data warehouse when you had DB2 is what IBM was saying. Oracle and Microsoft were not much better in terms of their stance to data warehouse.

There was no organization that supported data warehouse. There was no product called data warehouse. Data warehouse was not (and never has been) a technology. It was just an idea and it was attacked by the existing large corporations.

The only people who wanted data warehouse were the end users. The first people to recognize the value of the data warehouse were not IT people. In fact, the IT organization sided with the vendors of the day and rejected data warehouse outright. It is still cool in IT today to find reasons not to build a data warehouse.

Next came people who claimed to be purveyors of data warehouse but instead were peddling a data mart. They needed a basic lesson in data architecture.

Then came Big Data. The first words out of the mouth of Big Data were – “now that we have Big Data, you don’t need to build a data warehouse.” That message was given loud and clear by organizations such as Cloudera. Indeed, Cloudera raised millions in VC support with this message. Cloudera went public. And in the light of day and reality, Cloudera’s stock is on a long term steady decline. (Take a look at the history of Cloudera’s stock to verify this, if you don’t believe me.)

Now there is a new kid on the block. It is Snowflake. Snowflake openly addresses data warehouse and uses data warehouse as one of its intellectual cornerstones. Unlike Cloudera who distances itself from data warehouse, Snowflake acknowledges its data warehouse origins. Snowflake (as of this moment) is just about to go public. And the sagest investor of them all – Warren Buffett – has announced an initial investment of $470 million dollars. Certainly, Buffett’s money is welcome. But even more important is the imprimatur of having the number one investor in the world supporting the company. It is likely that the Snowflake IPO is going to easily eclipse the Cloudera IPO.

Which stock would you rather own – Cloudera or Snowflake or IBM?

And all of the other companies who try to replace or remove data warehouse languish on the sidelines as well. Do we need to tell those companies who want to replace data warehouse with silly things like a virtual data warehouse that it is just not good for the health of their company to adopt such a stance? Selling a virtual data warehouse is like a doctor prescribing aspirin for cancer.

The marketplace has spoken. The only people who hate data warehouse are IT and old stodgy vendors. The marketplace and decision makers firmly stand behind their data warehouse and all it can do for them.

There is no central clearinghouse for data warehouse. There is no central data warehouse organization. It is just a concept. There is no Good Housekeeping seal of approval for data warehouse. So how did data warehouse withstand the onslaught of IBM, Cloudera and a host of others?

Data warehouse is a fundamental architectural principle. It is as fundamental as the arch was to the Romans. The arch is fundamental to the churches of Europe and the aqueducts that still stand today and were built two thousand years ago. The walls surrounding Rome today rely on the arch for their longevity. Data warehouse is not (and never has been) a technology. Data warehouse is an architectural fundamental. Rejecting the data warehouse in modern technology is like trying to build a cathedral without an arch.

Lots of luck.

Standing armies cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

IBM tried. Look where that got them.

Bill Inmon’s latest books are TURNING TEXT INTO GOLD, Technics Publications and HEARING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER, Technics Publications and DATA ARCHITECTURE:SECOND EDITION, Elsevier. Bill’s company – Forest Rim Technology, is a Denver based company that has technology that reads raw text and turns that raw text into a data base.

Bill teaches a class – PRACTICAL TEXT ANALYTICS – on the Internet. For more information contact Bill at [email protected].