A welcome and interesting trend is the introdution of business process modelng into the data management operations silo.

Anyone familiar with urban legends would immdiately be dubious, and so I did a quick search and found a http://www.dssresources.com/newsletters/66.phpgood analysis of the history (and relevance) of diapers and beer.

Something to explore a little more: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

Also: the product is an "appliance," meaning that it is packaged software on top of hardware. No details of the hardware were presented, but it probably uses a number of multi-core CPUs with a lot of memory (how else could they do the analysis?).

Seems like an extremely interesting product, especially in the context of supporting e-discovery.

Vincent's presentation on iWay spanned the capability spectrum of numerous abilities for data integration. One interesting note: many other BI vendors have recognized the need for a data integration (or ETL) capability, then went out and bought a vendor or two to fill that void, then wriggled and writhed through the process of making the purchased tools work together. Information Builders has grown their own internal data integration suite, which obviates that need to make things work together, and that is an extremely appealing notion.

One thing that looks clear: the objective in maintaining Business Objects as a separate division focusing on being "open and agnostic" as to the platforms to be supported (aside from SAP) may allay fears of existing customers of being forced into the newly created "mega-stack."

I do wonder, though, about the extent to which there is cross-pollination between the product suites of SAP and Business Objects; there may be some nice chunks in NetWeaver that could be siphoned off and offered as part of a Business Objects Enterprise Information Management suite.

Another interesting point with respect to MDM: Aaron Mahimainathan, who is the Senior Director, Platform Marketing SAP, did admit the challenges in synchronizing master data between the BI environment and the operational SAP applications.

One way to do this is by categorizing your entries as well as adding additional tags. I was pondering this at some point, thinking that it should be possible at this point to use text mining tools to scan your content and pull out the "statistically improbable" phrases (as our friends at Amazon like to say) to be used as tags.

But what about non-text content? I can think of three commonly used content types that are growing in popularity yet require some extra thought for assigning meta-tags: pictures, voice recordings, and video recordings. As more of this unstructured stuff comes down the pike, we metadata folks should think hard about how to assess and capture semantics associated with these objects for the purposes of organization.

A few years back my friend Greg Elin put together a system for selectively annotating pictures. Check out his fotonotes web site. Perhaps there is some future in this for video?

DATAllegro
Dataupia
Kognitio
Netezza
ParAccel
Sybase
Teradata

I might throw Oracle, HP, and Sand Technology in there as well, but I think you see my point - there seems to be the perception that there is a market for high performance "plug-in" systems to deploy data warehouses. What is perhaps even more interesting is that half of these vendor offerings are not specifically hardware appliances, but rather software database systems that can be deployed on top of different hardware systems - in other words, they are "software appliances" (!?)

In essence, many of these approaches, along with some from other vendors as well (Vertica was notably absent from this crowd, but showed up at the previous Las Vegas TDWI) focus on structural optimizations (such as columnar-oriented databases) that are very well-suited for loading into core memory and providing very fast read access, making it especially nice for query/reporting clients. The realization that the database system can be optimized and parallelized in a way that is decoupled from the hardware makes these software-only approaches look very cost-effective, especially when considering sizing a warehouse to meet current needs while considering future growth. Not only that, these systems are finely tuned for performance, (see Mark Madsen's comments about ParAccel's TPC-H benchmark scores).

The common theme with the software appliance crowd is lowering the barrier of entry to Small/Medium businesses seeking to jump on the BI bandwagon. WIth a variety of operational modes that span full-blown deployments (with hardwre purchase and integration) down to a service-based hosted model, this platform enables data warehousing at a fraction of the cost. This concept in its own right is worth some more exploration, and I think I may try to address that in an upcoming column.

Check out Movable Type and Wordpress - pretty impressive. The software is pretty cool, provides all sorts of widgets and plug ins, and makes life a lot easier for keeping a web site fresh.

- MDM is more of a means than an end, and it is more likely to be justified in the context of other enterprise activities such as CRM or ERP.

- I have started to bristle at the phrase "golden copy." I now think that MDM is more about providing universal transparent access to a sngle representation of uniquely identifiable entity data, but that does not mean that entity data has to sit in its own silo.

- Comprehensive master metadata should include more than just data dictionary information

Stay tuned for more information on the book...

Two interesting aspects of the Spitzer situation. First, his tactics at using information to track down targets for prosection as NY State Attorney General are prime exmaples of exploiting business intelligence to identify patterns of misbehavior. Second, one would think that, knowing the tactics to be used to seek out suspicious activity, would have hesitated to expose himself to discovery via the same tactics.

I am finding, though, that I am building up an interesting set of books that provide value to the way I look at the use of information, so I thought I'd share a list of books that I have recently read, am currently reading, or plan to read some time in the near future. Each one deals with aspects of how we can learn from what we know, learn from what we don't know, then exploit what we can learn:

"The Wisdom of Crowds," by James Surowiecki
"Freakanomics, " by Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner
"The Tipping Point," by Malcolm Gladwell
"Blink," by Malcolm Gladwell
"The Black Swan," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Fooled by Randomness," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The Long Tail," by Chris Anderson
"Fortune's Formula," by William Poundstone
"Linked," by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
"The World is Flat," by Thomas Friedman
"Collapse," by Jared Diamond