What Is: Bypassing the Data Warehouse
Building a data warehouse is difficult and costly. The extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) process, required to transport data from operational systems to the warehouse, is time-consuming. One of the features of the data warehouse is that it represents a nonvolatile record of performance. Performance metrics reflect a "point in time" measure. These performance metrics do not change once committed to the data warehouse. But what if the requirement is for information that is an "up-to-the-minute" status report?
A number of companies offer XML-based reporting technologies that link directly to operational systems. In essence, these tools are capable of bypassing the data warehouse to provide real time "what is?" performance status checks.
In many instances these same tools can link to the data warehouse to extend their reporting functionality to prove the "what was?" reference points. These firms have been unable to provide any sort of scenario-based, or "what if?" planning.