DSS AWARE APPLICATIONS

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile

Another big problem we face in data warehousing is the whole extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) issue. Having to take data from lots of different places, pass it through some nontrivial (VIM) processing, and load into the warehouse comprises the major part of our development effort.

Historically, the applications from which the data has had to be extracted are entirely blind to the requirements of decision support. The relative success of data warehousing, or at least the success of the idea of data warehousing, should have convinced the application designers of the value of decision support, and they should be beginning to understand the link between the data that resides in their applications and the information that can be derived from it. Indeed, one or two of the major ERP vendors have already begun to see the value in this. Unfortunately, so far the value they have seen relates more to the dollars they can make than to the value their customers might gain. Although this seems like a pejorative view, the evidence is there. There are many dissatisfied customers of data warehouses where the warehouse was provided as a kind of bolt-on addition. The ERP vendor was guilty of jumping on the data warehouse bandwagon without bothering to understand the business issues surrounding data warehousing,

Anyway, be that as it may. In the future it is to be hoped that the independent software vendors will be sensitive to the requirements with respect to DSS in designing their systems. Who knows ? We might even get some standards.

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile