Data warehouse pain is real, says Stonebraker

I’ve been reading The Database Column with great interest. The new blog features the writings of Mike Stonebraker, the co-creator of the influential Ingres and Postgres DBMSs.

In his latest post, Stonbraker, among other things, reiterates earlier comments on his belief that CIOs are facing some tough problems when it comes to data warehousing. He wrote:

“I have talked to perhaps 50 CIOs and warehouse DBAs over the last year.

Their pain is evident, and is due to:
Warehouse size is going up rapidly, and query complexity goes up at about the square of database size
Load volumes are going up rapidly, and load times increase linearly with volume

As a result, the typical warehouse administrator is:
Saying “no” to ad-hoc query requests from business intelligence users
Having increasing trouble loading data within the load window allotted”

Stonebraker goes on to say that the success of Teradata, Netezza and other hardware appliance is proof of the “extreme pain” in the data warehousing  market.

“Organizations who are not feeling great pain would never bring such custom iron into their shop with its resulting hardware lock-in and high prices,” he wrote.