Data Warehousing Revisited: A Wal-Mart Case

The concept of data warehousing was born in the 1970-80s at the same time when Wal-Mart’s growing database gave birth to its need to view records in a more effective way. As the world’s largest retail warehouse, Wal-Mart represents the world’s largest data warehouse. A large portion of the discussionaround Wal-Mart’s database management heretofore has only been process-centric, however, not its data per se. The study largely involves technical concepts around database and takes a deep look at Wal-Mart’s chronicle of pre-implementation (preparation), implementation, and post-implementation (evaluation) of the data warehousing project. The highlight underlies how Wal-Mart acted against solving endless problems and was able to gear their data management to business contribution. By revisiting their data warehousing project case from a current point of view, we expect their lessons to be still available and applicable. With the renewed interest in (big) data and business intelligence, Wal-Mart’s high respect for data and technology holds a lot more meaning than a couple of decades ago.