Data Warehousing For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 23. Surviving in the Computer Industry (and Handling Vendors)

In This Chapter

• Shopping the smart way at conferences and trade shows

• Dealing effectively with data warehousing vendors

• Looking at the future of data warehousing and mainstream information technologies

The name of the game in data warehousing since the early 1990s has been hype. A lot of hype. Massive amounts of hype. Hype. Hype! HYPE! Whew — I had to get that out of my system. I'm serious, though. Whether you're talking about business intelligence suites (the best-of-breed versus highly integrated), OLAP tools (ROLAP versus MOLAP), middleware tools (data-movement-ETL versus federated-EII), or any other aspect of data warehousing, you may have a lot of trouble separating merit from empty promise, fact from fiction, in the wonderful world of data warehousing.

Although data warehousing has more substance and provides more value than many of its predecessors on the hype hit parade, the discipline has, in my opinion, been somewhat compromised by the usual bag of tricks that the shiftier side of some product and service providers (vendors and consultants) like to pull out.

Although I'm not one to point fingers, anyone who has been to a data warehousing trade show or sat through a couple of product demonstrations (and then tried to implement a real-world data warehousing environment with products that just didn't work as promised) knows what I'm talking about. A world of difference exists between looking at a few glossy brochures ...