Data Warehousing means having thousands of ETL jobs

Narrator: Another absurdly tetric myth being pushed by a cross-section of the expansive, permissive and obtuse talking-head data-mesh massive is that data warehousing necessarily means that enterprises have to have thousands of complex, expensive and unmanageable ETL jobs in order to build, maintain and expand their data warehousing reach.

For a small segment of « data warehousing » cases I am sure that this might be the case. Thinking of FBI, CIA, NSA and Google… maybe so. But, come one folks, your needs and that of your business are probably not along those lines, not even remotely so.

I have a different view. In my experience, small and medium enterprises using data warehousing will typically have between twenty to ninety odd ETL jobs, max. The notion of thousands of ETL jobs is just flim-flam sauce.

Large enterprises could well have hundreds of ETL jobs, but an organisation with thousands of ETL jobs either indicates an extraordinary and somewhat unique organisation or an amazingly bad ETL pipeline architecture, and maybe even also truly terrible “data warehouse” data-architectures and data-models.

But let me also make this very clear: data pipelines are not bad architectural patterns, no matter what the clown-shoes say or write.