Businesses aiming to deliver superior digital experiences, retain customers and innovate rapidly must seek ways to get value from data faster, and this is where real-time data warehousing helps.

In the beginning, simple systems collected data, wrote data to files, and created reports. For the most part, these systems operated on transaction-based data—bank deposits, sales, telephone calls, and the like. An entire infrastructure supported these essential business systems, but there was little or no place for text. All data was highly and tightly structured, and text was ignored.

This is a guest post by computer scientist Bill Inmon, recognized as the "father of the data warehouse." Bill has written 65 books in nine languages and is currently building a technology called textual ETL. Many years ago, there were no data warehouses. Most Ecommerce retailers relied on legacy systems with unintegrated data that couldn’t communicate with each other, resulting in data silos. Comparing data sets from these systems was almost impossible.

This is a guest post by computer scientist Bill Inmon, recognized as the “father of the data warehouse.” Bill has written 60 books in nine languages and is currently building a technology called textual ETL. Here are five things to know about textual warehouses: Imagine this scene. One day, someone in your ecommerce organization wakes up and can’t locate the information they need to prospect leads or check inventory processes.

The key points you need to know about data warehousing for Ecommerce include: The fate of Ecommerce businesses can rise or fall based on their decision-making and forecasting skills. By tracking the right metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators), Ecommerce stores can determine if their most recent marketing campaign or product launch was a massive success or an underwhelming disappointment—and if so, how should the organization correct its course?