An interesting challenge arises when changes are being made to the EDW.  If the current requirements are to remove some data that is no longer valid.  For example a product or service is being removed and so data which was being extracted is no longer available to be extract

I cannot resist quoting Roman on this issue: "Question: Data warehouse as a set of consolidated data marts or the “real deal” unified enterprise data model?  Answer: A person capable of devising a unified enterprise data model, which will explain all in the enterprise and be

I think a little history of data warehousing (DW) would be helpful to understand how it has evolved.  In the late 80’s and early 90’s the idea of an executive information system (EIS) started to be the fashion.  Programs were developed that would present data in

One of the design fundamentals in data warehousing (DW) is ability to drill down.  The term is really a part of DW jargon so I would like to explain it more fully.  I would like to use an example of a retail store which keeps data on products sold, customer, purchase price,

Download 45_coffeecast_45_teradata_partners_2007_keynote_address.mp3 Welcome to the 45th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd. Hello from Vegas – baby.  It is the end of day one of the Teradata 2007 Partners event and we have decided to break up the week as individua

I think that we often need to go back to fundamentals in our area of specialty because we sometimes cannot see the forest for the trees.  We forget we are here to drain the swamp when we are up to our ears in alligators.  In diving into a problem we sometimes need to get bac

What’s in a word.  In deployments the nature of the words you use can kill you.  SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is living proof of this opportunity for confusion. Remembering the fundamental guiding principles of SOA (see endnote below from wikipedia) we have an i

I had a chance over the last two days to get some initial exposure to NetVault from BakBone Software. So I was surprised, but in a good way. This is a fairly straightforward product.  Some thoughts: Job Setup – Easy all click and select and then configure Scheduling –

So over the last couple of days I have been really wracking my brain on the post I did about API vs ODBC.  And one of the things that it brought back to me was the idea of Service Oriented Data Architecture (SODA). I wrote about it before in the context of getting tight and invol

Welcome to the 44th CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  Well it is Wednesday night before Graham goes off to sail and I grabbed him to chat about what is on his mind and have a quick CoffeeCAST. Todays conversation was funnily I think more about the mind and attitudes o