Last night I saw a feature on the making of Avatar. What caught my attention about this was the way in which they had created a 'virtual camera' through which James Cameron could observe the live action of his actors morphed into their avatar bodies and displayed in the CGI generated world of Pandora - in REAL-TIME.
In my business world, which is about as far removed from Pandora as you could get, I build data warehouses and have been doing so for many a year. From time to time the concept of Real-Time Data Warehousing has arisen and largely been dismissed for the following technical reasons:
- Data Dependencies
- Slowly Changing Dimenions
- Complex Transformations
- Updating Aggregate/Summary Data and Cubes
All of the above are still valid, and there would still need to be a valid business reason to go to the extra cost and expense of building a real-time data warehouse as opposed to a cheaper batch one.
However, I'm sure the technical hurdles that the Avatar movie makers overcame must have been a whole lot longer than my sorry list. Maybe it's time for a rethink!
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