It has come to my attention that Leon Trotsky, the Russian communist theorist, would be very much at home in a different global plan to replace the status quo with radical change.

I know this because it is easy to imagine a Big Data/cloud proponent saying to traditional data warehouse users what Leon said to capitalists:

“You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on / into the dustbin of history!”

OK, so Trotsky didn’t have any data warehouse people to say this to, just capitalists. But his quote has the same fervor that always develops where the most ardent new-tech proponents speak of the old-tech they plan to replace.

And they are just as wrong as Trotsky was, though much less likely to be assassinated at a Mexican hideout.

They do different things

There are significant differences between enterprise data warehousing systems and Big Data/cloud systems. They are used for different things.

David Linthicum, writing in Infoworld, describes it this way:

“Traditional data warehouses typically work with abstracted data that’s been rolled up (cleansed and transformed, in data warehousing lingo) into a separate database (the data warehouse or data mart), for which specific analytics are known in advance (such as compliance reporting or sales trend analysis).”

“By contrast, big data systems tend to have raw data, whether from operations (log reports), user activity (website tracking), or other real-world usage (census surveys). That raw data is left as is because its usage is not predetermined, so there’s no known target to transform it to,” Linthicum writes.

Part of Linthicum’s pitch is that people who now tend EDW systems probably don’t have to worry about their jobs, at least in the forseeable future.

It is, after all, rare that something comes in and immediately replaces its predecessor. The best example of this happening was when, over the space of less than a year, the Internet and web killed-off dial-up bulletin board systems.

That’s not what will happen here.

EDW systems have been built to solve known questions, especially those asked repeatedly as part of business management and compliance.

Big Data systems are built — and this is their magic — to provide answers to questions that previously could not be asked. That’s not all they do, but that is what drives a lot of the hype: Answers to strategic questions that refocus the enterprise using data it already had but couldn’t process.

Companies have invested millions in their EDW shops and will, presumably, be loathe to toss something that works, generally quite well, while they experiment with something that isn’t quite fully understood.

People, like Trotsky, who predicted the downfall of the old order are just as wrong as those who believe EDW is about the take the fast lane to obsolescence. EDW and big data will coexist for quite sometime.

For my next tortured quote, Nikita Khrushchev’s famous, “We will bury you!“