Short answer to that provocative question: no – it’s just changing. Our data integration road show hit four U.S. cities over the past two weeks. The keynote presentation was delivered by James Markarian, SnapLogic’s CTO. He shared his perspective on modern data management, the role of the data warehouse in a hybrid cloud environment, and important considerations for an enterprise data lake strategy.
We were also joined by our partner, Amazon Web Services, who highlighted their cloud data management platform, with an emphasis on Amazon Redshift. Together we highlighted some of the joint SnapLogic/AWS success stories around hybrid cloud data integration, including GameStop, Box, CapitalOne, and eero.
The bulk of James’ keynote focused on the changes to the data landscape that are affecting the role and structure of the data warehouse. He described “data warehousing 1.0” from the 1980’s which introduced a convenient, single place to warehouse all data, but which was expensive and reliant on scripting to integrate sources. He contrasted that with “data warehousing 2.0” of the 1990’s which saw the rise of ETL processes and data marts, but which was still rigid and typically on-premises. Since that era, however, data warehousing has remained generally static. Now, with the dramatic increase in unstructured/polystructured data, plus cloudification of data sources, data warehousing 2.0 has fallen a bit short. Enter the data lake. James cautioned the audience not to think of a data lake as an amorphous, no-rules dumping ground for unstructured data. Instead, he identified multiple “zones” within the data lake, each of which has certain requirements, rules and uses.
Finally, James illustrated how lakeshore data marts and cloud-based data warehouses – connected using SnapLogic – address some of the risk and high labor costs that can be associated with Hadoop-centric data lakes.
Attendees – some of whom were already far along in their data lake adoption journey and some still in a “data warehouse 2.0” environment – certainly left with food for thought. Watch this space for the next time SnapLogic comes to a city near you.
In the mean time, don’t forget to subscribe to our data management podcast series called SnapTalk.
