A few days ago, I was on LinkedIn and a comment caught my eye. It was an ad from 1993, the year I was born, for Prism Solutions promoting PRISM Warehouse Manager, a software to build a corporate data warehouse in 5 days.
The ad says that their solution automates the integration of different operational data, gives reliable information for decision-makers, reduces maintenance costs, and can set up a cost-effective warehouse.
We bet Bill Inmon can dig up information about your company faster than you can. - PRISM Solutions
I had the chance to talk to Bill Inmon and his team, many times and consider him as one of my confidents about the challenges I meet in my career and I am always seeking his valuable advice.
If you want to know the origins of the compound word data warehouse, you must hear the story of Bill Inmon.
Bill spent years consulting for AMS, traveling week-to-week between clients like Aetna Life & Casualty, Shell Canada, and PacTel Cellular.
Despite their very different businesses, he noticed something: their corporate system architectures looked identical. In other words, you could close your eyes in Hartford and picture Calgary or Orange County; the diagrams matched.
During a meeting at Shell Canada with Gary Warholm, Donna Corrigan, and Herman Popgo, he admits that they were searching for a label for what they were seeing.
Someone—maybe me, maybe not—said it out loud: “data warehouse.”- says Bill Inmon
The phrase fit, so they used it. From that simple moment in Calgary, the term spread across companies and the world.
He may not have understood everything then, but he knew a data warehouse wasn’t just another transaction processing system; it had its own rules and characteristics.
Early warehouses were built with hand-coded ETL with a lot of painful work until automated ETL arrived. Prism Solutions helped teams build and load warehouses far faster.
One of his recent convictions that I deeply believe in: companies need ETL, not ELT.
Another: the “data lake” has been a misstep that set the industry back years.
Today, it still amazes me that two words spoken in a conference room could escape into the world and take on a life of their own.
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