Exploring the evolution of modern data analytics

After the advent of databases in the late 1970s and early 1980s, databases were treated as a central source of truth (SOT) and designed to record transactions and produce daily, weekly, and monthly financial reports. These are largely termed online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

In the late 1980s, businesses felt the need to understand how their business was performing and investigate any changes to sales, production, revenue, or any other important aspects of the business so that they could run their businesses more efficiently. But in order to conduct this investigation, they had to run complex queries across all tables in their database and be able to slice and dice the data to dig deeper into it. They also had to aggregate values in order to find totals and averages across a period of time. A relational model that spread data across multiple tables was needed to aggregate and join data across these tables. As a result...