The Data Warehouse “Monopoly Game”

Tera-Tom here! Almost everyone has played the board game Monopoly with their friends and family, but is your database vendor trying to play data warehouse Monopoly with you? Here’s how you recognize it.

The salesperson starts the Monopoly game by landing on your property unannounced as he rolls the dice that you are alone in your office.  He then mentions that he is “Just Visiting” but then lets you know that their new deluxe edition of hardware and “utilities” is twice as fast as the old system. His pitch promises you Boardwalk, but his biggest fear is that you will get “bored and walk.”  

It’s your turn to move next, and you roll snake eyes as you try to balance yourself when he reveals the price.  

It is the salesperson’s turn, and he pounds his community chest and hits you with a short line, “It is important to have all of your data in one centralized data warehouse.”  He knows he will meet his yearly sales quota if you pay the luxury tax.

If you say yes, the salesperson will light up like the Electric Company, but if you say no, the tears will fall like Water Works.

The salesperson rolls a double and then mentions that combining their education and professional services credits allows you to pay less, just like an auction.  

If you mess up here, remember there is no Get out of Jail Free card, but the data warehouse vendor passes Go and collects 200 thousand dollars!  

This is where the salesperson quietly mumbles Checkmate.

Take the advice I gave to a customer in Australia, “Don’t write the check, mate!”

It’s your turn, and you remember that there is a reason your company chose you to be the banker.  So you mention that it’s a buyers’ market, so why pay for Park Place when Baltic Avenue gets great performance too?

The salesperson tries to speak out of turn, but you remind him that you’re not buying the B & S Railroad and that you were born at night, but it wasn’t last night!

The salesperson’s next move is to mention, “The best property of their data warehouse is that users can join any data at any time across the board.”

You explain that your company’s data is so large that no one vendor can house it all.  You tell him that you only have a fixed amount of money and that the game has changed to the “Price is Right,” and since you’re “Smarter than a 5th Grader”, your job is to never put your company in Jeopardy by allowing any one player to have a Monopoly.

He strategically moves four spaces to the left, sits down in the chair, and remarks, “But think of all the good deeds I have done for you?”.

You have worked 50 hours a week for the past 10 years while raising three kids, so you move two spaces forward, lean in, and use your favorite quote, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Knowing that he is about to be eliminated from the game, he moves rapidly to the board and draws all the systems you have in different dry erase colors:

• Excel
• Microsoft Access
• Snowflake
• Redshift
• Synapse
• BigQuery
• Teradata
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• DB2
• Hadoop
• MapR
• Greenplum
• Postgres
• Vertica
• Netezza
• SAP HANA
• Yellowbrick
• SQLite

You then tell him that you have purchased a Universal license of the Nexus from Coffing Data Warehousing so you can buy whatever system has the best price and properties.

He rolls with an emotional plea that you don’t want to land on Chance!

Your role is to remind him that there are 10 tokens in Monopoly and that you are picking the iron and giving him the boot.

He asks if you can at least validate his parking ticket, and you respond, “Sorry, but it’s now company policy that there’s no Free Parking.”  The salesperson realizes he has been eliminated from the game and heads back to his hotel.  

You send him the slides below to show what features you purchased.  

Congratulations!  You have united the different system colors into the color of cash and won the Data Warehouse Monopoly game.

Here is what you should teach your children.