April 2001 - Volume 1, Issue 11

IN THIS ISSUE

Featured Article: When and How to Federate   

• Knowledge Management: It's Not All About the Portal   
• Improved Change Discovery through Operational Meta Data    
• Practical Data Administration – Part II   
• XML's Uses In Data Warehousing: Getting Data In   

• When and How to Federate   
  

  In previous articles we've explored the reasons why a single, monolithic data warehouse (DW) architecture is incapable of supporting the reality of today's heterogeneous, speed driven market (past columns are available at www.egltd.com and www.dmreview.com). This month, we'll examine when it is appropriate or required to move to a federated BI architecture.
• Knowledge Management: It's Not All About the Portal   
  

  This article is the first of a series that addresses the "trenches" of knowledge management and the core areas that require focus in order to deliver a successful knowledge "system".
• Improved Change Discovery through Operational Meta Data    
  

  How are you identifying changes in information coming to your data warehouses? This is a common question all data warehouse developers have to answer when designing the data model and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) methodology for their business intelligence environment. The ability of your ETL processes to quickly identify and process changes is critical in today's demanding business intelligence environment where real time updates to the data warehouse are becoming a reality (and nightmare for the data warehouse developer). This ability to rapidly identify changes from your source system data feeds can be enhanced through the incorporate and use of operational meta data. This is accomplished by incorporating operational meta data directly into the data mart design and ETL processes. This technique extends the design and architecture of the data warehouse to provide increased processing optimizations for data acquisition.
• Practical Data Administration – Part II   
  

  In the magical land of Logical Nirvana there lives Good Queen Normalization III. In this land the Black Night Redundancy lives in shackles in the basement prison. Redundancy shares his cell with his squire Urgent Deadline. The old village of Legacy Data has been toppled and the new city of Enterprise Data has sprung up in its place. The blind alleys and dead ends have been replaced by an efficient highway system. "Because we've always done it that way!" has been erased from the city archway.
• XML's Uses In Data Warehousing: Getting Data In   
  

  Over the past 10 years, data warehousing has proven to be a highly valuable technology that the vast majority of corporations have leveraged to provide them with a competitive edge in the marketplace. As we enter the next decade XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is poised to accomplish much the same. The one unanswered question is how will these two essential technologies function together?