Since the 1990s, organisations have gathered, processed and analysed business information in data warehouses.

The term “data warehouse” was introduced to the IT mainstream by American computer scientist Bill Inmon in 1992, and the concept itself dates back further, with the founding of Teradata in 1979 and work carried out by IBM in the early 1980s.

Their goal was to allow enterprises to analyse business data to improve decision making, without the need to interrogate perhaps dozens…