Data Warehousing has turned over a new leaf. Analysts are thinking beyond databases and ETL tools. Vendors are talking loud about their Big Data solutions, Hadoop integration and NoSQL products more than ever.

The old data warehouse understood our data through metadata. The old reported the patterns and trends we have asked. The old helped us find answers to our questions. The old just talked. And now, the old is dead. Data warehousing is dead.

Long live data warehousing! The new will make us understand our data. The new will go beyond dimensions and facts. The new will do more than just group-bys. The new will discover knowledge from data. The new will help us find questions to the answers. The new one thinks.

It’s a brave new world out there. The new is young and immature. But that’s ok for the time being. Let us wait for the new to come forth, naturally.