And consumers get angry when promises go unfulfilled. This is not to say that there haven't been some great advances in technology for OLAP, data mining, the Web, and so on, just that it ought to be easier to understand what the actual advances are and easier to put them to productive use. New product categories are continually popping up, and end users are constantly bewildered by the dizzying array of new products and new product categories that they seem to need to solve their problems. And because industry conferences tend to reflect the jargon created by the vendors, regardless of how heavy a presence the vendors actually have in the conference, it's hard to get a jargon-free education anywhere. With all this noise, it is difficult to see what is real and what is hype, and it's difficult to assimilate all this newness into a consistent, stable framework.
Data warehousing is perhaps the worst offender.
The real issues boil down to the optimal distribution of storage and computing. And depending on the particular needs of an organization, the optimal configuration may allow for transaction and decision-support processing to take place in the same database, or there may be a clear separation. Imagine that the ideal computing configuration corresponds to a color. There could be any of a nearly limitless variety of optimal colors for a particular situation, and a framework for defining the optimal color would map the situation conditions to the color spectrum. In other words, a data mart is just one color on the color spectrum.