This white paper from our friends over at Vertica discusses how the race for a unified analytics warehouse is on. The data warehouse has been around for almost three  decades. Shortly after big data platforms were introduced in the late 2000s, there was talk that the data  warehouse was dead—but it never went away. When big data platform vendors realized that the data warehouse was here to stay, they started building databases on top of their file system and conceptualizing a  data lake that would replace the data warehouse. It never did.