We’ve all heard of exciting new technologies in the Data warehouse world—tools like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and more recently Azure SQL Data warehouse. What would you call this category of tools?
Well, of course, “cloud data warehouse.” Check out the Google Trends graph for this search term. Explosive growth.
But look at this:
The red graph represents searches for “Amazon Redshift,” compared to “cloud data warehouse.” It is growing much more rapidly, and appears many times larger, than the category it represents.
In fact, according to Google, there are only approximately 300 people per month over the past year in the entire world who searched for the term “cloud data warehouse.” (By comparison, “Amazon Redshift” is searched 14,800 times per month worldwide.)
Ha, you might be thinking, “they must be searching for other things, maybe ‘data warehouse on the cloud.’” As someone who has done several rounds of market research in this field, I can tell you assertively there are no larger search terms that describe the category.
In fact, the category does not exist.
I know it sounds funny to say the cloud data warehouse category doesn’t exist. After all the market is hot, tools are popular and growing rapidly. But the fact is—what comes to people’s minds is the tools, the brands; not the category.
But wait a minute. Data warehouses have been around for ages. As far back as the 19th century Thomas Edison stored the results of his electricity experiments in a (legacy) data warehouse, installed on the highly scalable Kinetoscope Platform in his Menlo Park laboratory.
So surely there must be searches for just “data warehouse?”
Yes there are. They’re declining. But look at the comparison between “data warehouse” in blue and “amazon redshift” in red. Redshift’s 14,800 are a drop in the ocean compared to “data warehouse.” That term alone is searched 90,500 times per month globally, and there are many other related search terms. “Data warehouse” is huge.
Let show you another data point. I went through the laborious exercise of gathering all the possible search terms people have used recently, around “plain” data warehouse, vs. the three leading cloud data warehouses (Hey I used that phrase! That’s 301 mentions worldwide).
