First came the traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDW). Structured data is integrated into an EDW from external data sources using ETLs (check out my recent blog post on this). The data can then be queried by end-users for BI and reporting. EDWs were purpose built for BI and reporting. But with the growing desire to incorporate more data, of different types, from different sources, of different change rates, the traditional EDW has fallen short. It does not support unstructured data (i.e., video, audio, unstructured text, etc.), streaming is for the most part out of the question, there is no data science or machine learning that can be done directly on the data, and because of their closed/proprietary nature, costs quickly skyrocket as organizations scale their deployments. Modern, cloud-based EDWs have looked to address several of these challenges and done a good job of it, but some challenges still remain, with the obvious being lack of unstructured data support.