Blog: William McKnight

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January 26, 2008

Data Warehouse and MDM classes coming on the GRID

On March 10, I will be giving my Introduction to Data Warehousing course and on March 11, I will be giving my Introduction to Master Data Management for the Enterprise course. Both are full-day courses. Both will be held live at SetFocus in Parsippany, NJ. However, they will both be available on "The GRID", which means you can be ANYWHERE in the world and attend remotely. It's very cool technology - you will feel "in the class." Information on The GRID can be found at this link.

Technorati tags: data-warehouse, master-data-management

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January 16, 2008

Data Governance would be easy...

It's occurred to me that there are 2 areas that continually need work in my clients' data governance/steering (and data stewardship) programs. This work comes AFTER the participants are selected and usually after the programs are engaged.

1. The IT team really has no interest in being advised on what to do in the first place
2. No 2 governance members can agree on what that advice should be anyway

Make sure the IT team is accountable to the advisement from governance and make sure that governance includes a sponsor attuned to this (#2) reality and empowered to foster collaborative advice.

Technorati tags: data-warehouse, data-governance, data-stewardship

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January 2, 2008

The Best of Data Warehousing 2007

Continuing the awards for the “best of” information management tools for 2007, I move to the proverbial “back end” and offer up some “best of” products that provide the foundations of our environments. Thinking back over the products I’ve worked with in 2007, I have to repeat my belief that it was the “Best of” year in information management.

Best Open Source DBMS

MySQL Enterprise Fall 2007 Release – This is the commercial subscription offering for the popular MySQL open source database (which makes it “low cost” not free – for those who associate open source with free). It includes a comprehensive set of production-tested software, proactive monitoring tools, and premium support services for corporate developers and DBAs. MySQL provides a full suite of database drivers and graphical tools to help developers and DBAs build and manage their MySQL applications.

Best Data Warehouse Appliance

I take this opportunity to say there is no ‘best’, only best for a given situation because indeed there are many with good value propositions.

Best Federated Query Facilitator

SQL Farm Combine 1.9 – While I still believe a proper data warehouse is necessary in modern information architecture, as a stopgap or bridge measure, you may need to query multiple SQL Server databases without co-habitating the data. With SQL Farm, users can query multiple databases and SQL servers or instances, receive one result set from all data sources, and save the aggregated results to relational databases or data warehouses.

Best Data Warehouse SMB storage

Sun StorageTek 2530 array – I like it’s Common Array Manager software, which was designed to be an un-intimidating implementation for an unseasoned administrator and leverage the same look and feel from Sun’s server management software.

Best Data Warehouse Prototyping Tool

WhereScape 24 - WhereScape 24 is installed on data warehouse developer PCs and connects to both data sources and the target data warehouse database and generates native Teradata, Oracle and SQL Server scripts.

Best “Next Product I need right now” – Email me. Architecture and Tool Selection, Development and Planning is one of our offerings.

Technorati tags: data-warehouse, data-warehouse-appliance, wherescape,mysql,sql-farm,2530,open-source,dbms

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