Requirements

Advanced analytics involves processing data from source business/enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance data, human resources data, and many other similar sources. These sources can vary, depending on your industry. Pharmacies or hospitals, for example, will have patient data, medical procedures, insurance data, and radiology and imagery data.

Traditionally and even to date, these kinds of analytical systems involve a central data warehouse. In Chapter 1, in the Exploring the evolution of modern data analytics and Discovering the challenges of modern-day enterprises sections, we observed how the nature of data and the requirements of data analytics have changed. A traditional data warehouse is built on strong relationships between data entities. This provides the ability to slice and dice the data in different ways without worrying about the consistency of the data as the relationship rules...