Let’s talk about your development environment. Specifically, I’d like to chat with you about the virtual space where your data architecture team, software developers, and information curators do their development and testing work. A proper development environment is logically separated from the production environment, and is often further partitioned into different realms for initial development, data or functional validation, and…
Earlier this week, the state of Iowa held its caucuses to choose each political party’s nominee for November’s presidential election. Being the first state in each election cycle to do this, the electorate of Iowa has the attention of the nation; a candidate’s healthy or anemic showing in that state often foretells his or her success for the rest of…
Encapsulating business logic into data movement and presentation is a critical part of a stable information management strategy. Too often, though, business logic is built and added late in the process, forcing it into whatever nooks and crannies are available. While this duct-tape approach sometimes works, it makes the resulting system difficult to maintain when the business logic is spread…
It wasn’t so long ago that the first day of the month was the most common trigger event for updating key metrics. Indicators such as profit, efficiency, bonuses owed, and other markers would be published monthly after that month’s data was tabulated (which may be days or even weeks into the new month). In some organizations, the work required to calculate…
When designing a data warehouse or reporting architecture, the smallest questions can pose some of the biggest challenges. Identifying what may appear to be an obvious term or metric can slow down or even derail a business intelligence initiative. Early in my career as a BI professional, I was faced with just such a scenario when trying to address a…
Those who follow my blog know that I write a lot about data quality. Measuring and improving the quality of data is an important part of any data initiative, especially in the data warehousing space. While data quality does get its share of attention, there is a concept that is equally important but is sadly overlooked during most data projects:…