1 Introducing the Data Platform
This chapter covers
- Drivers of change in the world of analytics data
- The growth of data volume, variety and velocity, and why the traditional data warehouse can’t keep up
- Why data lakes alone aren’t the answer
- The emergence of the cloud data platform
- The core building blocks of the cloud data platform
- Sample use cases for cloud data platforms
Every business, whether they realize it or not, requires analytics. It’s a fact. There has always been a need to measure important business metrics and make decisions based on these measurements: Questions like “How many items did we sell last month?” and “What’s the fastest way to ship a package from A to B?” have evolved to “How many new website customers purchased a premium subscription?” and “What does my IoT data tell me about customer behavior?”
Before computers became ubiquitous we relied on ledgers, inventory lists, a healthy dose of intuition and other limited, manual means of tracking and analyzing business metrics. The late 1980s ushered in the concept of a data warehouse – a repository of data combined from multiple sources – which was typically used to produce static reports. Armed with this data warehouse, businesses were increasingly able to shift from intuition-based decision making to an approach based on data.