The Data Swarm: A Next Step for Distributed Data Analytics

The traditional data warehouse model is no longer able to keep up with the evolution and changing requirements of the data analytic world. As we see the concept of a logical data warehouse gain momentum, there's a resulting need to drive a portion of the analytics closer to where the data is actually created and used. This paper uses the concept of swarm intelligence as a basis for simple, distributed analytics architecture to help address this need. It illustrates this with an example based on a chain of retail stores and demonstrates how this model could simplify the architecture and, at the same time, and increase data availability while decreasing cost.