Data warehouse offerings are increasingly adding new tools to help manage and re-configure your warehouse with the goal of increasing performance. In fact, IBM recently announced new "extreme" workload management capabilities as part of its recent DB2 Warehouse release to go beyond priority based workload management and enable companies to truly address the requirements for operational BI applications that must reliably deliver real-time responses.
However, to best take advantage of these tools, it is important to understand exactly what's going on with your data warehouse. Many organizations are constantly re-configuring their data warehouse environments in a trial by error approach, blindly re-partitioning their data, setting up new nodes and defining various workload classes. The best way to use these tools and make configuration changes is to first understand what data is being used, how it is being used, and by what users and applications.
IBM just introduced a new suite of tools to help organizations better understand how their warehouse is being used, and leverage that knowledge to improve performance, making it easier to grow their data warehouse environments. This will not only provide better performance and greater scalability, but will help enable companies to use their enterprise data warehouses for operational BI applications.
A recent TDWI article provides some details on this.
