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Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid, 7th January 2026
The origins of data warehousing are often pinned to the late 1980s, when the term “business data warehouse” first appeared in an influential IBM Systems Journal article by researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy. I was based in Birmingham at that time, and I also wrote a similar foundational document on Information Centres for Sperry Univac.
Yet, as with many technological breakthroughs, the story is far richer and older than the conventional narrative suggests. The foundational components of what we now recognise as a data warehouse were quietly taking shape as early as the 1960s, driven by the need to organise, integrate, and analyse growing volumes of business information in an era of punch cards, magnetic tape, and the first mainframes.