Attention Data Warehouse and BI Professionals: Your Rock Star is Back in Town

Normally, when a rock star comes to town, tickets sell out fast. And when that rock star is a genre-defining pioneer, your odds of getting a seat diminish to almost zero.

Well, data warehouse and business intelligence professionals: your rock star has come to town. And we’ve got tickets just for you – for free.

On Wednesday, April 2, Dr. Ralph Kimball, considered the father of business intelligence, will join Cloudera, the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services, for a free online webinar on integrating Hadoop with the existing data warehouse. Full details on the webinar, entitled “Building a Hadoop Data Warehouse: Hadoop 101 for Enterprise Data Warehouse Professionals,” can be found here.

A Hadoop Data Warehouse?

A common misconception is that Hadoop is fundamentally incompatible with the traditional data warehouse – much in the same way it is impossible to insert a compact disc into your iPhone. Indeed, it is sometimes thought that advocates for Hadoop are attempting to replace the data warehouse as we know it today.

This is where Dr. Kimball enters the picture. As BI folks know, Dr. Kimball has always been a pragmatist. So it makes sense that he would argue that Hadoop can be used to complement the existing data warehouse – as opposed to replacing it outright. The partnership between Dr. Kimball and Cloudera reflects a new paradigm:

Hadoop can actually supplement the infrastructure that agencies have painstakingly constructed over time.

The Big Data Reality: Augmentation is the Key

For Dr. Kimball, a critical driver for collaborating with Hadoop technology leaders is to bridge the gap between the two worlds in the interest of harnessing the power of ‘big data.’ In the most recent edition of his groundbreaking book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Dr. Kimball argues that the requirements for analyzing data in the 21^st century – that is, data that is structured, unstructured, semi-structured, and delivered in a myriad of formats – cannot be accomplished using traditional relational databases.

Therefore, Dr. Kimball began working with Cloudera to figure out how to break free of the finite capabilities of traditional data warehouses. His findings may surprise you.

What You Can Expect from the Webinar:

Dr. Kimball will discuss the many ways Hadoop can complement your existing relational infrastructure to achieve the following:

• Achieve Cost Savings: Storing data in the data warehouse is expensive, while the pressure to store and process agency data has never been greater. You’ll learn the ways Hadoop can help you explore a more cost effective approach to your data warehouse.
• Solve Traditional Data Warehouse Challenges: Some people think Hadoop is just for Instagram photos and other unstructured data, but it can actually help agencies address persistent struggles with their structured data as well.
• Improve Mission Service Delivery: Discover how to extract new insights from your data that will help core mission outcomes, as well as the ability to translate analysis into service delivery more quickly.

Speaking of discovering new insights from your data, Dr. Kimball’s book also highlights a number of new use cases that have been discovered through the augmentation of the traditional relational database. But the list of potential use cases is growing rapidly each day. We’ve highlighted a few of our favorite uses cases from around the government:

• National Security and Crime Prevention: Law enforcement at all levels of government is harnessing both real-time and historical data to more efficiently hone in on potential threats and vulnerabilities.
• Public Health: Health agencies are leveraging the torrent of health data available – usually in a myriad of formats – to coordinate care, track health outcomes and measure the efficacy of public programs.
• Weather Tracking: By culling together billions of observations per day from various sensor platforms all over the world, it is now possible to use high powered computing techniques to employ forecast and early warning systems for communities living in disaster-prone regions.

Of course, for followers and practitioners of Dr. Kimball, hearing the master discuss the possibility of standing up a data warehouse according to the Kimball design architecture using Hadoop will be very interesting. But progress is all about disrupting old models, and it’s very encouraging to see a traditional leader integrating new technologies into proven methods to come up with something that is simultaneously pragmatic and groundbreaking.

This Time You’ll Get a Ticket

Unlike the last Bruce Springsteen concert, you are guaranteed a front-row seat in the house, regardless of where you are in the world. Just make sure to sign up before the event. As a registration bonus, Dr. Kimball is offering a free excerpt of his book, which focuses on big data analytics.

Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management with the first unified Platform for Big Data: The Enterprise Data Hub. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, process and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Learn more here.