Rethinking Data Analysis and Reporting: The Case for the Correlation Data Warehouse

by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal
Enterprise Applications Consulting
June 2009

In order to understand the economic impact of the correlation database, EAC interviewed seven illuminate customers and reviewed the details of another eight correlation database implementations. The results of this effort show a dramatically higher ROI and improved business benefit from the correlation database relative to both a column-based data warehouse and a relational data warehouse.

While individual implementations vary tremendously, illuminate customers achieved dramatically measurable improvements over both Sybase IQ and SQL Server customers when it comes to overall data warehouse cost and the cost and time to make changes to the database and analytics.

These factors in turn reduced time-to-analytics and time-to-answer significantly, as well as improving the ability of the data warehouse to support the analysis needed to leverage new business opportunities. This latter factor is perhaps the most significant of all: being able to use the data warehouse environment to support rapid business change and understand or open up new business opportunities provides a long-term, strategic value to the data warehouse that has been lacking in all too many implementations. Importantly, without the cost reductions and agility that the correlation database provides, this new opportunity factor would be hard to realize.

Taken together, these different factors translate into a significant value to customers that goes beyond the kind of metrics the data warehouse market has typically focused on: load speed and query speed, to name just two. What the correlation database does is move the value discussion away from these more technical aspects of data warehouse design in order to focus on direct customer benefit. In this light, time-to-analytics and time-to-answer become a much better yardstick by which to measure data warehouse performance—and by this measure the correlation database provides significantly more value than traditional data warehouse technologies.

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