RFID Tags and Smart DustRFID tagging will create not just a tidal wave of data, but lifetime employment for data warehouse designersContinued from Page 1 The nature of our applications will be increasingly operational, real-time, and driven by the need to analyze sequential behavior. The operational and real-time demands will accelerate the design of hot partitions as extensions to our existing static fact tables. These hot partitions will be fed with new extract pipelines from the data sources that are capable of watching the RFID measurements as they occur. Enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors make their living by connecting separate operational systems together with EAI "message-grams." The data warehouse hot partition can subscribe to this message-gram traffic on the local area network, and dribble the RFID measurements directly into the hot extension of the regular fact table. (I explored a number of these ideas in "Realtime Partitions," Feb. 1, 2002, which can be found at IntelligentEnterprise.com or on my Web site at www.ralphkimball.com.) Relatively few of our data warehouse applications do a proper job of analyzing sequential behavior. Rather, we usually stand at a point in a pipeline and monitor the flow at that point. But sequential behavior analysis changes the perspective to follow an item down the pipeline, past many different data collection points. Each of these data collection points is likely to appear in the data warehouse as a separate dimensional schema because the changing dimensionality of these sources as you move down the chain makes it logically impossible to combine the data collection points into a single schema. The increased emphasis on analyzing sequential behavior will increase the need for well-architected drill-across applications relying on conformed dimensions, as well as multipass querying. I have described this architecture many times in my articles and books. The Assault on PrivacyWe in the data warehouse industry are aware of the impact of ever-increasing data collection on our personal privacy. But the wide use of RFID technology is a really big jump toward tracking every person and every object. In my opinion, the technology is far ahead of our understanding of this impact, and even further ahead of properly written laws to protect our privacy. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and it won't be easily put back. Given our increased security concerns stemming from terrorism and the SARS epidemic, the forces that argue for widespread data collection and the integration of these sources will be hard to resist. (See "Watching the Watchers," July 17, 2000 for more on this subject.) Beyond RFID to Smart DustIn many ways, the RFID revolution is past the scientific phase and into the engineering and deployment phase. The basic technology is well understood and the ongoing development is now focused on reducing the unit cost of the tags and perfecting manufacturing processes for embedding the tags in all the possible applications. But another, even more astounding revolution is gathering momentum. Smart dust takes the concept of a simple RFID circuit replacing the bar code label, and extends it to embedding an entire computer in a microscopic package! If that seems outlandish, consider the following: The Intel 8080 microprocessor, released in 1974, was a 2MHz device. By 1980, personal computers running DOS were built around this processor, and usually had 640K of memory. In the intervening years, the size of our desktop machines has remained relatively constant, but the power of the CPU and the size of the real memory have both increased by a factor of more than 1,000. Instead of holding the size of the box as a constant and allowing the power of the machine to increase, what if we hold the processing power constant and allow the size of the box to shrink? We end up with an 8080-class machine in a "box" 1 millimeter in size! This is smart dust. A number of research projects have demonstrated the ability to manufacture smart dust devices. These tiny computers can even be packaged with microscopic batteries. Really tiny computers can run on miniscule amounts of power, and it's possible to package a battery alongside the computer in a 1-mm package that will run the computer for years. Smart dust can be used for environmental reporting. Scatter or even paint smart dust in an environment. The separate processors can self-organize into a network that you can interrogate remotely. Security and military applications are just the tip of the iceberg. Search Google for more on smart dust. Many separate smart-dust development efforts are underway. I have always advised data warehouse people to stay in the center of the runway as they plan their careers. CRM, information portals, and BI will come and go. But standing back from these short-lived themes, the real constant is the irresistible growth of data sources and the insatiable demand from our end users to see the data. Although the RFID and smart dust revolutions will change our vocabulary and our tools, our mission remains constant. Data warehousing in its many forms is guaranteed job security. Ralph Kimball (founder of the Ralph Kimball Group) co-invented the Star Workstation at Xerox and founded Red Brick Systems. He has three best-selling data warehousing books in print, including The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Second Edition (Wiley, 2002). He teaches dimensional data warehouse design through Kimball University and critically reviews large data warehouse projects. You can reach him through his Web site, www.ralphkimball.com.
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