Welcome to the 12th Episode of Coffee Conversations (now to be called CoffeeCAST) with Stephen Hayward of Project X. This week we are podcasting from the Starbucks at Bayview with Michael Ianni-Palarchio (MIP) where we decided to have a spontaneous CoffeeCAST on a variety of subjects.

In last weeks Think Big DW Conference 2006, Stephen Brobst the CTO at Teradata gave a talk on The Sins of Denormalization.  It was a great little chat with the audience.  In the talk he discussed the Data Model.  Before I start, I thought I would jump on Wikipedia to ge

Sitting in my cubicle today I heard this over the divider, "What it is, is what it is."  Meaning the data warehouse data load job was running longer than expected and no one could explain why.  But that was okay because in the computer business we have to expect th

Welcome to the 11th Episode of Coffee Conversations with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Today talking with me in the Starbucks in Mississauga I have Tim Dickey of Teradata.  In his review of some of the conversations and posts he noticed that a lot of our posts have been about building

Over on MIP’s Scan this morning he mentioned an application he was given access to use. As he discusses (Dabble DB) this is an online software as a service (SaaS) application that allows you to build a database application in more of a business oriented way.  I found this v

I was reading a competitor’s brochure the other day and then showed to Jim and we both agreed.  Really great stuff. In their definition of eXtreme IT they are really referring to Agile development methods of which we are big proponents.  It didn’t go into great d

I was reading the Financial Post newspaper on Saturday and ran across this great article Camisoles & Cabbages by Hollie Shaw.  It was great on coverage of the evolution of the Canadian leading retailers in their quest for more revenue and a defence against our friends from th

Often when we work with out Business clients we are too quick to say, yes that can be done, but … We need to reduce the deliverable It will take X months It will cost Z when you only have Y and so on… I was in a meeting this week, when we started to talk about this. 

In honour of Easter Weekend. So which came first the report or the data.  This is a trick question, just like the chicken and the egg.  It is obvious, the business. In a recent presentation from a prominent reporting company, the presenter said the following (and I paraphras

Welcome to the 9th Episode of Coffee Conversations with Stephen Hayward of Project X. Today I welcome back Jim to join me in a discussion on Metaphors and Technology.  In a post we did a couple of weeks ago and again this week, we endeavoured to use metaphors to help ground the variou