Intelligent Enterprise

Judging by the fact that this article is among the top five on our site thus far this year, I know for a fact that database/data warehouse scalability is a hot topic with the readers of Intelligent Enterprise. With this in mind, I'm hosting a Web seminar tomorrow entitled "Database Scalability: How to Plan for the Long Haul." The star attraction is none other than database/data warehouse guru Richard Winter, principal of WinterCorp and director of the Winter TopTen program.

With data volumes exploding as they are, it's no surprise that many of you are looking to alternatives such as column-store databases and data warehouse appliances. But the point of tomorrow's seminar is to plan your core enterprise data warehouse with long-term scalability in mind. That means you'll choose the right architecture and make plans for optimization and tuning that are appropriate to your needs. Richard Winter will discuss these topics in detail, and his advice will apply whether you have a sub-terabyte deployment or something that might qualify for his famous TopTen report.

"It doesn't necessarily take a large volume of data to run into scalability problems," says IDC analyst Dan Vesset. "It's not always the technology's fault; sometimes it's a lack of knowledge among the people who are deploying the technology. They don't necessarily know how to optimize, and that's why you see vendors coming up with reference architectures."

In some cases, practitioners have the knowledge, but they would much rather throw hardware at the problem. That was the case for at least one IT exec I talked to who was eying a data warehouse appliance for complex analyses of Web traffic and transactions. He said right up front that the benefit was not having to tune and optimize the database. What's more, he was dealing with consistent, known queries, not the kind of ad hoc queries for which you can't effectively tune and optimize.

Before you fix plans for a new EDW and before you conclude that you've reached a wall with current investments, make sure you fully understand how to plan for EDW scalability over the long haul. Here's the registration link for tomorrow's 9pm PT/12 noon ET Webinar. The event will also be archived so you can see it after the fact, but you won't be able to submit questions to data warehouse guru Richard Winter.