Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
Paige Roberts, Vertica open source relations manager, provided a contemporary definition of the data warehouse and its "deploy anywhere" orientation during her presentation at Data Summit Connect 2021.
"What does the data warehouse look like now?" she said. "And it's a piece of hardware and you buy it and now you have a data. 'So I can do analytics now?' No, you can't do analytics yet. You gotta put data there first."
A data warehouse is not just a technology, she explained, a data warehouse is an architecture. It has everything from a bunch of different sources and organizations need software to pull those in and combine them and put them into an analytical database, which is the heart of the data warehouse.
Once data is in there, organizations need to be able to analyze the data and then visualize it.
"And it's gotta sit on some hardware and maybe that's in the cloud," Roberts said. "Maybe it's a new cluster. Maybe it's some specialized hardware. Maybe it's, you know, simulation from some software like Mio or VMware where they're simulating something else you can do like private cloud, all of that, this entire slide, that whole thing. That is a data warehouse that architecture, that concept of, I have to have all of my data from multiple sources combined into a database, which sits on some hardware and then visualize that and use that to do active drill downs."