Well I was catching up on things and saw that it has been announced that Teradata will be on there on hopefully by September 30, 2007 (see Teradata News). Good for them, but it will be interesting to see what happens.  As rumours of Teradata becoming more of a Software play (the

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

We have been working over the past several months with a client who has DataStage (IBM Information Manager).  At one point we reached a fork in the road and had a choice of which interface to use into the database – ODBC vs API. Not sure exactly why we chose ODBC stage to c

At the Teradata User Group meeting in Toronto I attended a great session lead by Betty Knight of Teradata.  Before I jump in I had one great observation on this presentation – it was good and mixed tech and bus together nicely.  So here are my observations: As in previ

Welcome to the 42nd CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X Ltd.  I took a few minutes of space at a Starbucks along with Graham Boundy to chat about last weeks Teradata User Group meeting and a few other musings along the way. This was an impromptu meeting without any agenda, bu

Well in this months Teradata T-Alert we all learn that Teradata is to be spun out from under NCR.  This will be very interesting.  Revenue of $1.5 billion is nothing to sneeze at, but does it make it an M&A jewel? Here’s more… This will certainly make it easi

I was involved in some analysis this week that really taught me the best practices in tables, views and access. We had a new end user application that wanted to create a view to get access to a table of data (in this case all of the table).  In the process of figuring out the bes