That can be avoided, he said, if "you couple analytics as a platform offering that has the data generating part sitting closer together. Then you totally do away with that problem."
In other words, possibly hosting eBay's BI-as-a-service on Amazon's EC2 and storing users' data on S3.
Amazon is using EC2 to provide its own Web-hosted database called SimpleDB. Other vendors who plan to use EC2 and S3 to offer hosted versions of their databases include EnterpriseDB and Oracle.
Self-service BI capabilities have become a hot topic of late. Microsoft announced last week that through "Project Gemini" it plans to create an easy-to-use Excel-based tool that lets regular analysts easily build their own BI queries and dashboards.
But Ratzesberger said that much of the self-service BI capability already came built in to the Teradata 5550 data warehousing software it runs.
"Yes, we built a Web portal and a point-and-click interface. But there was very little that we otherwise had to build," he said. The Teradata software provides "very solid" workload management capabilities, so that "virtual" data marts can be partitioned and be automatically given lower priority than production data marts, Ratzesberger said.