In line with its annual major release cycle, Tableau has today released version 7 of its software. This marks the seventh major release in the company’s seven year history which is quite an impressive achievement. I have been playing with Tableau 7 during the Beta program and had an in-depth preview at the Tableau Customer [...]
I’ve previously had a simplistic view of Master Data Management (MDM), that its aim was to build and maintain a ‘Master Entity’ that is clean, unique and free of data quality problems. Something that proves costly on most Data Warehouse Business Intelligence (DWBI) implementations. However after attending William McKnight’s Master Data Management course I now [...]
A colleague and I recently attended Sharepoint Saturday in Canberra. A day-long conference of all things MS Sharepoint. The sessions were broad ranging, appealing to business focussed and highly technical alike. Most business intelligence tools in the market today are accessible via a browser-based interface or portal. With the increasing use of collaboration tools, integration [...]
Agile data warehouse test led development involves creating the test cases prior to development, and is a key part of the Agile development process, as it helps to clarify requirements, provide an accurate gauge of progress, and an early look at the data. Here is the process for making it happen.Agile data warehouse test led [...]
Kimball University’s ETL Architecture course explains ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) as being the “kitchen of data warehousing”. In other words, it is where data is cleaned and combined to make it fit for human consumption. Our experience has shown it helps if ETL Developers can get out of the kitchen and view the restaurant [...]
Agile Business Intelligence principles are based on its cornerstone of small, quick iterations focusing on value at each cycle and building quality solutions in a time-boxed way, seems to be the right fit to deliver information management solutions. However many people end up disappointed, having been given unrealistic expectations. More often than not, clients are [...]
At times implementing a data migration can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Data migration is often considered as an afterthought in a program of change and frequently suffers time, budget and scope creep. Very rarely does the legacy data map exactly or neatly to the new structures. So [...]
I was recently asked to develop an Information Management Strategy business case in 5 days. Considering the client was a multi-billion dollar mining company and we only had a team of three people, it seemed like a big challenge, but we were able to leverage our past experiences and artefacts to lay out a plan [...]
Now that Master Data Management (MDM) technology has been around for nine or ten years, what is the state of play in the MDM tool market? Are they relatively mature, similar to BI or Portal technology, for example? Or are they still somewhat immature? My contention would be the latter, unfortunately. In Gartner terms they [...]
A common question arising during Data Warehouse implementations is where should business rules live in the realm of the warehouse? Suggestions may include the ETL, the semantic layer, BI objects (reports, cubes etc) or the business analyst’s temporal lobe? The latter least preferred and is easily resolved by comprehensive, accurate and complete documentation. As a [...]
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