Database Design for Mere Mortals™: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design, Second Edition

What the Future Holds

The manner in which databases are used has evolved immensely in the past several years. There came a time when many organizations began to realize that there was a lot of useful information that could be gathered from data they stored in various relational and nonrelational databases. This prompted them to question whether there was a way to mine the data for useful analytical information that they could then use to make critical business decisions. Furthermore, they wondered if they could consolidate and integrate their data into a viable knowledgebase for their organizations. Indeed, these would be difficult questions to answer.

IBM proposed the idea of a data warehouse, which, as originally conceived, would allow ...