Forrester’s James Kobelius asks: An Enterprise Data Warehouse Without A Database—Is That Even Conceivable? Turns out the discussion is more around RDBMS vs. non-relational DBMS such as Hadoop, and he’s suggesting that we’ll see a rise of non-relational systems because of the rise of less structured content. Forrester’s school of thought also marks it perfectly reasonable to have a distributed design:
This points to another key trend in EDW evolution: the continued transformation of these infrastructures away from traditional centralized and hub-and-spoke topologies toward the new worlds of cloud-oriented and federated architectures. The EDW itself is evolving away from a single master “schema” and more toward a semantic abstraction layer and use of distributed in-memory information as a service (IaaS).
Good read on the EDW basics from today’s standpoint, thx James!