In the high seas of mission-critical data warehousing, consider all platforms sinkable until proven seaworthy. Selecting the database platform is one of the major decisions involved in building a data warehouse. While it's natural to turn to the Database Management System (DBMS) that successfully runs the operational side of your business, you may want to look before you leap. The stresses and demands of a healthy, evolving data warehouse may be more than an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database management system is designed to handle.

A database's competence at transaction processing doesn't automatically qualify it to support growing and dynamic data warehouses. As this paper suggests, that very specialization in transaction workloads often translates to a life-sentence of data warehouse compromise.