Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

Industry Logical Data Models... What do you think about them?

Fri, 22 May 2009 04:26:51 -0700

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.

Part 10: Secrets of the Masters, Dealing with Real-Time Data

Sat, 09 May 2009 05:25:42 -0700

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.

When does a Vendor have too much power over the Analyst?

Thu, 07 May 2009 08:39:45 -0700

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.

Governance, Compliance, and Accountability

Wed, 06 May 2009 06:51:41 -0700

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.

Some VLDW Secrets

Wed, 06 May 2009 01:41:27 -0700

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.

More on Auto-morphic Data Models

Tue, 05 May 2009 08:22:04 -0700

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.

Oracle and Exadata - Asking some much needed questions

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:16:36 -0700

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.

Verizon Wireless and the Lack of Customer BI

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:00:42 -0700

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!

Future of ETL and Transformation

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:22:34 -0700

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.

Futures: BI & Data Visualization

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:04:09 -0700

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...

Future DBMS Appliance Possibilities

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:09:52 -0700

We live in a world proliferated with hand-held devices. These devices can watch TV, see streaming movie content, browse the web, and provide interactivity via iconography and touch panels. Yet, we have serious problems with the delivery mechanism of an EDW, and BI on these devices. Yes, we can produce graphs and charts, and web-based reports - but it all appears to be back-ended by large scale systems that must be up all the time, and that we have to be interconnected to the web in order to "work" with our applications.

There are needs out there beyond the connected, that I will explore in this entry.

Follow up on Jill Dyche's Communities for DW / BI

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:22:04 -0700

I've just read Jill Dyche's excellent entry about the value of communities, and I agree - communities are important for us to collaborate and communicate. It's why I'm happy to be a part of B-Eye-Network.com, and LinkedIn where I belong to a number of communities. I'd like to take a minute to tell you about other communities that we've launched recently.

By the way, I won't do this very often - most of the time I like to blog about business and IT. I felt it necessary to let everyone know what I've been up to for the past 8 months, in addition to traveling to Europe to teach the Data Vault.

Now before you start commenting on how this is an advertisement, let me say - yes, it is in a way. But as always, I am trying to provide the business with serious value. The value here? Budgets are being slashed on average of 20%, training budgets are nearly gone, yet new innovation must continue. You can no longer afford to "go to a class", nor to "pay" to have an instructor come to you. It's tougher and tougher to get budget to attend large conferences. We are putting content on-line, and making it affordable, so you can continue to learn and innovate at your own pace without the high-cost, and without a lot of expense. We believe in the community messages, and are fostering three new communities that will really help the DW/BI space.

One major effort, centers on e-learning. You can get to this community at http://inmoninstitute.com - Bill Inmon, myself, and Hans Hultgren offer on-line training for you on subjects like DW2.0, Unstructured Data, VLDW, Data Vault, CIF, and business accumen of DW/BI landscape. We are posting new material every week. Register for free, watch a few courses now.

In this day and age where IT budgets are slashed, it becomes near impossible to "go to a class" or to bring an instructor in. You can take these courses at your liesure from your desk, and it's a very reasonable fee. Anyhow, the e-learning community is the place to go for new knowledge, you can register for free, and see the quality of the video and sound that we produce, and watch a few free segments.

I also launched a more intense community around the Data Vault modeling called the Data Vault Institute. The new URL will come soon, but for now, you can reach it at: http://www.danlinstedt.com/datavaultinstitute/ This community is free to register. In this community, you will find white papers, articles, downloads, and a host of customers and IT folks using the data vault and discussing the business practices all over the world. This community is more than just a technical community, it's for business users too. Here they can find out the business value of the Data Vault, and why it helps put agility back in to their IT teams. We will also offer a FREE 3-D data model visualizer for anyone who pays to upgrade as a subscribed member. Sign up now for free!

Finally, next week, I'm launching another e-learning community - with a focus on Software Tool training. You can see the "old-site" now, at http://www.trainovation.com - the new site is completely revamped and will be launched next week. It will start with Informatica based e-learning, my own custom courses finally available on-line for a reasonable cost. So take a look at this site in about another week or so to get access immediately to new content. I'm also interested in talking to vendors who want to post their own training courses on-line with us, we have a full production video studio.

If you like this kind of entry please comment and let me know. If you don't like this kind of entry, like-wise, please let me know. I am curious to the feedback - and I promise, if you like it, I'll keep you up to date only once every 6 months.

You can email me directly: danL@danLinstedt.com

Cheers,
Dan Linstedt

Intro to Compliance - Sarbanes Oxley and your EDW

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:45:30 -0700

In this entry we explore the nature and notion of compliance - specifically Sarbanes-Oxley and what it means to your EDW. I've been working with compliant based systems for years. Over the years I've learned about data as an asset, that is: data in the EDW affecting the financial bottom line. I've learned about audits and auditability (been through a few of them myself). In this "series" I will first explore sarbanes oxley, then follow with CoBIT, ITIL, SEI/CMMI Level 5, and a few other things. Please let me know what you think of this entry/series and if you'd like to see more.

Fun Programs to keep your computer running smooth

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:44:17 -0700

This has nothing to do "really" with BI, but on the other hand, we nearly all use Windows at some point in our career, and over the years I have latched on to some vital programs that I really like to use to keep my machine running efficiently. They are mostly fairly cheap, and work really really well.

The need for: IT Agility & Data Warehousing/BI

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:01:34 -0700

In this day and age everyone is cutting costs, every customer and corporate client is looking for ways and means to become lean and efficient. I've heard a lot about disparate "enterprise data junkyards" recently, especially when it comes to stove-piped solutions involving star schemas as an EDW causing problems with IT agility. As a result of problems with IT agility in the area of EDW/BI processing, business users continue to build spread-marts (access databases, along side of complicated excel spreadsheets). In this entry we will explore this phenomenon, and discuss what executives and business users can do about this growing issue.