Users drive move from mainframe

Reviewer: Kalman Balogh

This issue of the Communications of the ACM is dedicated to the rich and complicated theme of Data Warehousing. It is not an introduction to the theme, rather a state-of-art from practical point of view. It droves our attention to the process of Data Mart and Data Warehouse creation and usage before the big boom of its application. The series of articles emphasises and illustrates in more and more detail, why careful selection of the approach and the tools, building the projects and planning and design the implementation processes is inevitable. After the overview it starts with managerial considerations. It shows the possible ways, the costs, the intangible and measurable benefits. To clarify notions and purposes, it contrasts the transaction-oriented operational databases and the functional division or enterprise-wide information stores. It explains role of the information catalog or repository and metadata management. Some articles describe concrete developments at different large firms and organisations (logistics, investment, communications firm, health care). Successful architectures and some vendors (IBM, NCR) and development tools are introduced. It was not the aim to enumerate and compare the main vendors of the technology, but rich and interesting sites on the Web are enumerated.