How small can a data warehouse be?

Elsewhere, I assert that there is a trend towards a strategic, holistic view of a company’s data. This trend is endorsed by major vendors such as Oracle and Microsoft and especially through recent whitepapers and product announcements around reporting and analytics. The Oracle + Siebel (and now, Sigma Dynamics) offering against the forthcoming PerformancePoint Server 2007 product from Microsoft / ProClarity looks an interesting conflict and one where both sides are likely to take ground from the standalone reporting vendors.

But the small, tactical solution is not yet dead. Recently we were asked to look at providing a stop-gap point of sale reporting system – one fact table, three dimensions and a couple of years of history – now you probably don’t get much smaller that that. But is that a data warehouse? Powell would say a datamart, but mainly because of his assertion that datamarts are the source systems for data warehouses.