There are quite a few vendors out there who publish industry logical data models.  I've had my fare share of direct, hands-on experience with them over the last 8 to 10 years.  In this entry I will share a few of the pros and cons of these classifications of models. My objective is more of an inquisitive one, in hopes that you will respond with your experiences, and if you are a vendor: please post your opinions.

The market has been asking for EDW's to deal with more and more real-time based data.  IT on the other hand has become "slower and less agile" as their current system of federated data marts gets larger and larger.  In this entry we will deal with some of the issues, some of the questions, and of course offer an opinion into the insight of dealing with true real-time data sets arriving at the doorstep of the EDW.

I've always felt that this blog (with the agreement from Bill Inmon, Shawn Rogers, and Ron Powell) is a place for me to express my guarded, guided, and best possible opinion about vendors, the industry, industry direction.  I've also long believed that vendors DO HAVE GREAT PRODUCTS, but sometimes their marketing and sales campaigns get a little over-zelous and advertise "features" that simply arent' quite true, or that the product doesn't behave in the situations they claim it does.

Recently however, I've been getting "flack" from certain areas of the industry because some of the vendors who read my blog don't like what I'm saying.  They are exerting indirect pressure on my friends and industry affiliations to "disconnect me, take me off the map." Claiming I have no right to share my information on this blog, and questioning if I should even be an industry analyst in the first place.

This entry is a question to all my readers (vendors included), and I hope you will respond with your thoughts and comments.

There are many definitions of governance, compliance, and accountability in the industry, and it seems as though many of us are struggling to define it for the EDW/BI space in some generically acceptable way.  As I've recently researched these subjects (and been involved in them for years) I've noticed a trend that many of the definitions are vertically challenged (if you will).  They focus on a vertical industry rather than on horizontal enterprise data warehousing. 

In this entry I'll add my two cents to this noise as just another voice of opinion on these subjects.

This by no means is meant to be an exhaustive list, however some of you may find it helpful. It's a set of information about Very Large Data Warehousing I've gleaned over the years.  I hope you enjoy it, and please add your own knowledge by commenting on this entry.

I've been working heads down quite a bit lately on building new releases, and of course on new research and design.  I appologize for the silence on my blog to all my faithful readers.  The good news is that Data Vault Data Modeling is taking off in the world, mostly due to compliance, governance, and auditability requirements faced by major industries.  You can follow this on http://www.DataVaultInstitute.com - free forums

On another note this entry will explore some of the R&D notions that I'm currently developing.

My good friend Richard Winter just published a document about Oracle and Exadata and scalability.  Don't take this the wrong way, but I believe the findings are lopsided at best.  I hold Richard in the highest regards for exercising VLDB systems, but this report clearly is aimed at highlighting what Oracle does best - but it is missing crucial information about very large systems performance that I've been asking about for years.

Very interesting conversations I had with Verizon Wireless tonight.  The fact that they insist on charging me over $200 for two cell phones plus an early termination fee of over $100 makes me sick.  Especially after the fact that I had cancelled one of the phones in October 2008, and the other one - I thought I had requested a plan change to $24 a month....  We'll let me tell you that the lack of BI and customer service is alive and well with the big corporations, never mind the small guy, never mind the fact that I've paid them tons of money for the past 10 years, never mind that I've been a loyal customer!

This entry is a candid look (opinionated mind you) at what I see as the future of transformations themselves.  We will cross several subjects in this entry, as it is meant to be a look at where transformations currently happen, where they need to happen, and what's actually happening in the market place.

We live in a world where video delivery is becoming the norm.  Business users are getting tired of "bar-charts" and "standard reports".  They want interactivity.  While drill-down was an interesting development in interactivity, there doesn't seem to be any major advancement from the BI vendors in years.

With the advent of Flash-delivery, and Microsoft's new Silverlight platform, one would think that BI vendors would have had tremendous advances in technology recently, but no - we're still dealing with the old column based delivery mechanisms, and we think that Pivot tables are "cool"...  Man, we're stuck in the 80's here people...