The first time I heard the words data warehouse was in 1985. A new and inexperienced systems architect, I was a member of a tiny team in IBM Ireland’s internal software laboratory. We had been asked to propose a new approach to providing consistent, reliable management information to sales and finance teams in IBM Europe who were struggling as the business underwent significant change in the types and range of hardware and software products being sold.

The technology solution was pre-set as the then emerging relational databases and would showcase IBM’s DB2 that had launched in 1983. Although relational databases would conquer the world by the mid-90s, at the time, they couldn’t match the power and function of the then dominant hierarchical databases, such as IMS, in operational systems. DB2 was looking for a market niche, and decision support was chosen.

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