Published: February 2009

Building a data warehouse environment with a true hub-and-spoke architecture has long been an idealized and elusive goal. While it is achievable to build a centralized “hub,” or enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that supports company-wide detail data, the challenge lies in building and maintaining the “spokes,” or dependent departmental data marts.

Most data warehouse environments have evolved into one of two architectures: a centralized EDW or a series of distributed and/or federated data marts. However, there have been some crucial problems with the federated approach to data warehousing, leading vendors and experts to promote a centralized, monolithic EDW approach.

Although this approach has helped some vendors differentiate themselves from competitors and justify high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for their products, it is important to note that centralization is seldom scalable or easy to manage. Conflicting end-user and management-use cases, demanding performance requirements, increasing user sophistication, and ongoing demands for scalability and flexibility all work against even the most efficiently managed monolithic system.

As a result, many departments and business units have resorted to creating their own independent data marts to address these challenges.

For more information on this topic, you can read the white paper here.

Abstract courtesy: Microsoft