Volumn 5, Issue 1 - April 2011

IN THIS ISSUE

Featured Article: David Birmingham: Appliances and Data Warehousing, An Impact Review   

• Jason Tiret: Taking a “small r” Approach to Building a Metadata Repository   
• Ken Jones: MDM Integration Scope   
• Pete Stiglich: The Virtual Data Warehouse?   
• James Bean: Principles, Standards and Patterns – Architecture Guidance and Governance   

• David Birmingham: Appliances and Data Warehousing, An Impact Review   
  

  The advent of appliances in data warehousing has left a number of indelible marks on the warehousing landscape in general and upon some vendors in particular. Many decision-makers see appliances in the same manner as they would a kitchen appliance. The connotation is that an appliance is small, infrequently used and “handy”. This of course doesn’t compare to the ensconced, expensive, vaunted and heavily-used power-plant with name-brand databases and commodity hardware they currently deploy for enterprise data warehousing. Perhaps this is where the decision-makers need to look more closely.
• Jason Tiret: Taking a “small r” Approach to Building a Metadata Repository   
  

  Most data management professionals are no strangers to the benefits of good metadata, nor are they oblivious to the challenges of managing it. Data architects and data stewards have long strived for data conformity through the data standards they create, and it remains a top day-to-day priority. After all, “data about data” can translate into big benefits like decreasing data redundancy, increasing awareness of corporate assets and standardizing on reusable data objects. But, as important as it is to ensure that the IT staff is armed with metadata to design and implement systems, this information is equally vital to the business. Business users, more than ever, understand the value of metadata and are using it a number of ways – to find information, to increase business intelligence, to ensure the accuracy of reports, to build new lines of business, to do impact analyses, to perform audits and to ensure they adhere to compliance mandates.
• Ken Jones: MDM Integration Scope   
  

  According to Wikipedia, Master Data Management (MDM) “…comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization….At a basic level, MDM seeks to ensure that an organization does not use multiple (potentially inconsistent) versions of the same master data in different parts of its operations, which can occur in large organizations.”
• Pete Stiglich: The Virtual Data Warehouse?   
  

  It is true that there is a lot of work involved in setting up a traditional data warehouse – there are data modeling, ETL, technical architecture, and database administration and tuning tasks that might be avoided or minimized when taking a virtual approach.
• James Bean: Principles, Standards and Patterns – Architecture Guidance and Governance   
  

  Architecture as a practice can be enterprise-wide, can be aligned with specific domains (e.g. data, application, network, security, SOA, and so on), or it can be more focused on a discipline such as a Solution Architect. With each of these examples, there are a set of requisite skills, some of which can overlap across domains and disciplines. There are also a set of reference artifacts that define an optimal approach to technology solutioning. It is these artifacts that become the foundational reference of an architecture practice.