Ambient Data and DataStreams instead of DataWarehouses

Microsoft has done quite some research on capturing high volumes of event data, the idea is that in many cases it is not viable or even possible to build a DW to analyse data streams and also real-time analysis might be needed. Example applications could be click-stream analysis in real-time or analysis of all calls in a phone-netowrk, events generated in a manufacturing plant. The analysis can also be done on historical data, which means that this approach overlaps with traditional DataWarehouses.
The technology is called StreamInsight and can be tested right now, it will be publically available in first half of 2010 as an addition to SQL Server 2008 R2.