I'm about to keynote a fun series of talks with IBM called Discovery Days.  We'll be covering topics around optimizing systems for speed, efficiency and analytics.  If you're in any of the below named cities I hope to see you there!  And if you're in St. Louis, Phoenixor New York City and you want me to consult or speak to you or your team (end user organizations, software companies) while I'm in town, let me know as I can plan some time before or after the conference.

The known days so far are:

May 5

Indianapolis, IN

JW Marriott Indianapolis

May 10

St. Louis, MO

Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel

4/29 update: St. Louis event rescheduled due to tornado at airport; new date is 5/24

May 12

Phoenix, AZ

Ritz Carlton Phoenix 

June 9

Columbus, OH

Westin Columbus

5/22 update: I'm going to Boston June 9 to give a keynote for Break Free 2011 instead.  I'll post about those events soon. 

October 4

New York, NY

Tbd

There will be a few more.  I will post as they become known.

Here is the link to the first event in Indianapolis.

I made it to the Oracle Collaborate show this week in Orlando.  I presented a case study presentation on a MDM initiative.  I spent several hours in the expo hall talking with people in some interesting concepts.  A couple of themes stood out as being somewhat new to being on an expo hall floor.

1.       Lifecycle data support

There continues to be evidence that new approaches are necessary to keep data alive and do it at a lower cost than keeping "all data online everywhere".

Sure, we've got major compression and columnar orientation to compress complete rows of data everywhere it resides.  However, we usually don't usually want to carry production data loads in the development and test environments, yet we need data that approximates production data there.  One feature of IBM Infosphere Optim, among others, is the ability to get a representative sampling of production data into those environments according to the direction you set. 

Also, there were the archival features of TierData, which smartly determines which production data, even columns, you can safely archive to improve the overall performance of the application.

2.       Part Time Help

The commoditization of certain functions that were always just there in the shop and taken for granted continues.  For better or worse, services like SmartHelp from Circular Edge and DBA on Demand from SmartDog give their clients flexible work arrangements for a variety of technical enterprise functions.