The Decline of the Business Intelligence Cube (and What's Replaced It)
Blog post from Sigma
Business intelligence (BI) cubes, once essential for efficient data manipulation in an era of limited computing power, have become largely obsolete due to advancements in cloud computing and modern data analytics tools. Historically, BI cubes allowed teams to extract and manipulate data from databases for quick analysis, but they faced limitations such as time-consuming data modeling, inflexibility with new reports, and the inability to access transaction-level detail. The advent of cloud data warehouses, like Google Big Query and Amazon Redshift, has eliminated the need for BI cubes by offering scalable, cost-effective storage and direct OLAP workload capabilities. Modern tools like Fivetran and Matillion provide flexible data pipeline solutions, enabling seamless connectivity and transformation without extensive coding. Additionally, BI solutions like Sigma leverage cloud power to allow direct querying of live data and offer flexible, user-driven data exploration, thus modernizing the BI landscape by integrating cloud-native approaches and advanced analytics solutions.