Oversimplification 

By Drew Minkin Posted Monday 7th May 2007 18:56 GMT

The fundamental premise of this article oversimplifies a very complex technology set.

Teradata supports replication, dimensional analysis and has a slew of ETL tools

Microsoft can use pure ROLAP to build a cube over a relational store without it’s a private data mart.

I agree that many BI solutions bring cannons to a rabbit hunt, but the pretty diagrams misrepresent two very flexible and robust architectures that are not mutually exclusive.

The point to emphasize is that both are viable and can do the same work for the most part. Microsoft certainly is not ready to do to Teradata what it did to NetWare any time soon, but every release narrows the gap. Proven enterprise scales and non-Microsoft shops will keep Teradata flush for decades.

Dig deep, look for the devil in the details and keep your user community in mind as well.