Businesses and organizations of all sizes are becoming increasingly dependent on data analytics, and data warehouses or business analytic infrastructure has become a business critical application for many (if not most) companies. Indeed, these companies have always searched for better ways to understand their customers, and anticipate their needs. They have longed to improve the speed and accuracy of operational decision-making. Equally important as timeliness is the depth of the data analysis. Generally, the companies want to decipher all secrets hidden within the massive amounts of ever-increasing data. A data warehouse appliance, which is an integrated collection of hardware and software designed for a specific purpose typically involving the high throughput of data and analytic functions, can be used by organizations to optimize various areas of data processing. Its main intent is to supplant conventional business intelligence functions, such as warehousing, extract-transform-load (ETL), analysis and reporting. Due to its cost-effectiveness and efficiency, the data warehouse appliance has become an important segment of the data warehousing market. In this paper, I will examine the data warehouse appliances and describe its positive impact on business enterprises.
Introduction
Since introduced in the early 1990s, data warehouse (DW) has proven to be the key platform for strategic and tactical decision support systems in the competitive business environment today. It has become a major technology for building data management infrastructure, and resulted in many benefits for various organizations, including providing “a single version of the truth, better data analysis and time savings for users, reductions in head count, facilitation of the development of new applications, better data, and support for customer-focused business strategies” (Rahman, 2007). The technology has become extremely important in an environment where increasing
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