The IBM data warehouse architecture
Charles J. Bontempo, George Zagelow · Communications of the ACM · 1998
This article comments on the IBM data warehouse architecture and its application in various sectors. Users of IBM's data warehouse solution represent a wide range of communities differing with respect to business activities and processes, services and products, resources and cultures, and, most important, business objectives. This diversity has motivated IBM's development of a comprehensive set of data warehouse offerings and an integrated warehouse solution designed to serve a wide range of requirements from simple query and reporting to advanced data mining. The initial version of the IBM data warehouse architecture, published in 1993, was motivated by problems many users experienced when trying to derive useful information for decision support from their operational data sources. Before the advent of data warehousing software, these problems often meant intolerable delays in the production of reports and query results needed for timely decision making.