Data Doghouse - performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing

Boston TDWI Meeting - May 9, 2013

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming free TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP.

• When: Thursday, May 9, 2013
  12:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
• Where: Deveber Conference Room
  Children’s Hospital Waltham
  9 Hope Avenue
  Waltham, MA 02453
• Costs: none
• Topics: "Implementing a new BI Stack at Children’s Hospital” by Ron Wilkinson, Children’s Hospital Boston
  “Top Trends Revitalizing BI” by John Bair, CTO, Launchpoint Corporation

"Implementing a new BI Stack at Children’s Hospital”
Children’s Hospital recently implemented a completely new BI stack consisting of Netezza data storage, Informatica ETL processes, and a MicroStrategy front-end. The presentation will cover architectural decisions, experiences migrating from an existing BI implementation to a completely new stack as well as lessons learned.

“Top Trends Revitalizing BI”
Attendees will gain insights into:

• Why Big Data, Advanced Analytics and Cloud Computing technologies matter
• Architectures for building new business analytic services
• Strategies for moving from passive to active analytics
• Approaches for helping your business stakeholders lead with BI

Read the full agenda.

Register http://tdwichapters.org/pages/boston/event-registration.aspx.

TDWI Boston Dec 6 - Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders +

ATTENTION ALL BI/DW AND ANALYTICS PROFESSIONALS IN THE BOSTON AREA
Dear Boston BI/DW and Analytics Professionals,
We cordially invite you to attend our upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting on December 6, 2012. Come meet other local professionals, swap business cards, share ideas, and exchange career advice while listening to quality presentations in a vendor-neutral setting, which is the hallmark of TDWI education.  Our featured speakers will be Wayne Eckerson, BI Leadership Forum, and Rick Sherman, Athena IT Solutions. Wayne will talk about analytical leadership and Rick will talk about self-service BI. We will also have a panel discussion around BI implementations. Please see our meeting agenda below.

When:	Thursday, December 6, 12noon – 5:00 p.m.
Where:	The First Marblehead Corporation - Auditorium, 3rd Floor One Cabot Road Medford, MA 02155 Free parking in One Cabot Road parking lot And  less than 5 minute walk from Wellington T Station (Orange line)

DON'T MISS THIS EVENT! Please RSVP below
Click here to register for the next upcoming event

Presentation: " Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders” by Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research, BI Leadership Forum

Abstract
How do you deliver bridge the worlds of business and technology? How do you harness data for business gain? How do you deliver value fast from BI and analytical initiatives? Based on Wayne’s book by the same title, this session will unveil the secrets to success of top BI and analytical leaders, covering both the “soft stuff” of people, processes, and projects and the “hard stuff” of architecture, tools, and data.

Presentation: “Self-Service BI: New Technology Enablers & Hype” by Rick Sherman, Athena IT Solutions, industry analyst

New BI technology such as data visualization, data discovery and BI appliances proclaim the new age of self-service BI. How do you separate the hype from reality? How would you position these technologies with “mainstream” BI? What is the impact on business people? Are these tools appropriate for SBM (small to medium) or just large enterprises? How do these technologies fit with other emerging trends such as cloud, mobile & advanced analytics?

Panel Discussion: “BI implementations: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly”, Moderator: Gary Bernstein, DataSense Solutions
Panel includes industry analysts and BI practitioners as well as
Wayne Eckerson & Rick Sherman 

Going to TDWI Conference in Boston September 19-20?

I’ll be attending the TDWI World Conference in Boston, my hometown, next week. The conference theme is Agile BI. As many of you know I am one of the Chapter offices of the TDWI Boston User Group. The user groups are a great way to network with your peers, exchange ideas and keep tabs on the market.

If you are attending the conference on either Wednesday September 19 or Thursday September 20 and would like to talk, send me an e-mail or text me to see if we might meet.

The Power of RAM: How In-Memory Changes Everything (DM Radio)

DM Radio is interviewing me on in-memory, details below:

DM Radio: January 19, 2012, 03:00PM ET

Register

Most information workers know that Random Access Memory (RAM) can work wonders, especially when compared to computations that require spinning disk. But who would have thought that in-memory capabilities would storm the market the way they have in the past couple years? Sure, RAM-powered analytics have been around for years, but the prevalence of this technology is now significantly changing this industry.

Register for this episode of DM Radio to hear Hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson interview Analyst Rick Sherman of Athena IT Solutions, plus database guru Michael Stonebraker of VoltDB, Roger Gaskell of Kognitio and Jim Dietz of Teradata.

Register

Temporal and Bitemporal Data

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP.

• When: November 16, 12:00 p.m.- 5:00 p.m.
• Where: Children's Hospital Boston
  Auditorium B
  1 Autumn Street
  Boston, MA 02453
  
• Topics:
  • "A Temporal Data Overview" by Craig Baumunk, BitemporalData.com
    
  • "Bitemporal Data in the Financial Services Industry" by Douglas Eisenstein, Advanti Solutions
  • "Bitemporal Data in the Medical/Pharmaceutical Industry"
    
    

Maximizing the Value of On-Demand BI for SMEs

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP.

• When: September 29, 12:00 p.m.- 5:00 p.m.
• Where: Children's Hospital Boston
  Deveber Conference Room
  9 Hope Avenue
  Waltham, MA 02453
  

Topics:

• "Maximizing the Value of On-Demand BI for SMEs" by Rick Sherman, Athena IT Solutions
• "Customer Case Study: Choosing an Affordable Data Warehousing Solution" by Hugo Sheng, Expressor Software
• "Leveraging Common Technologies and Tools to Deliver a BI Solution (Don't let Your Tool Wag Your Data)"by Rosendo Abellera, BIS3
• "Web-based Healthcare Explorer & PIDA" by John Ormond, UMass Medical School
  

My take on why ETL has not always kept up with the integration workload

Why are companies reaching the limits on the workhouse ETL? Here are some thoughts that occurred to me as I was snowblowing 20+ inches of snow today. I’ll be discussing this further in the Thursday DM Radio broadcast.

The main reason why ETL is not keeping up is that demand is significantly increasing:

• The number of data sources, data volumes, update frequencies, need for data consistency (cleansing, conforming, MDM, CDI, PIM, etc.) are all on the rise
• Data architecure and workflows have become more extensive and sophisticated to meet business needs
• Companies are using ETL for more than data warehousing
• ETL is not just batch-oriented nightly loads, but rather data integration using various data transports and supporting various data currencies

ETL or data integration tool capabilties have expanded and there are many techniques that have been around forever that still work today but people aren’t taking advantage of these solutions. There are several issues:

First, there is still too much ETL hand-coding. Although most large corporations use ETL tools to load the data warehouse,  departments or functions within the same companies often hand-code data marts, OLAP cubes or other databases used for business intelligence and analytics. In addition many midsize and smaller firms hand code because they think all ETL tools are expensive.

(They’re wrong. There are plenty of cost-effective and capable ETL tools in the marketplace today.)

Second, people don’t use ETL tools properly. Many ETL developers are either using their ETL tools as if they hand-coded, or they are simply using ETL tools to run hand coded SQL scripts or stored procedures. This approach does not use any of the ETL tool capabilities nor leverage ETL best practices. The result: less efficient, less productive data integration.

Third, people don’t understand data integration. Even when ETL developers do attempt to use ETL tool capabilities they often do not really understand data integration processes.  If they have any training it is only tool specific; they haven’t learned basic data integration processes. In this scenario ETL productivity and performance suffers. The real solution would involve learning the skills necessary to leverage the tools more effectively.

Fourth, people don’t know ETL’s secrets. There are many “old” tried and true techniques and utilities that greatly improve the performance and productivity of ETL processes. But ETL develpers don’t know they exist – probably because they’re not sexy enough to be touted in industry literature.  The classic example is extracting data from a source system into a file and then cleansing, transforming and sorting the file prior to loading into a data warehouse. Although this technique is old-school, it’s a very cost-effective and productive way to significantly improve load performance.

Some steps in the right direction

BI vendors have built many of the best practices in data warehousing, such as various slowly changing dimensions (SCD) and change data capture (CDC) techniques, into their data integration products as ETL transforms.  These transforms significantly improve developer productivity and system performance, and are quite cost-effective.

Another positive note is that, finally, there are many advances in ETL processing that can significantly improve performance. You’ve heard about the benefits of in-memory analytics. In-memory ETL processing results in referential integrity checking and faster lookups,  and improves overall load time.

There are many other capabilities that can likewise improve ETL performance. I will be discussing these points and others during the broadcast.

The Expanding Value of Data Modeling

I hope you'll join me for my latest webinar:

Date: November 17, 2010
Time: 12:00 PM EST / 9:00AM PST

From integration to quality, business insight to enterprise agility, the value of data modeling extends throughout the enterprise. Modeling data not only improves the performance of operational and analytical systems, it provides a window into the nature of a business. Increasingly, organizations are discovering that by analyzing their data models, they can identify new relationships in their information architectures, which can result in new opportunities.

Register for this Espresso Shot Webcast to learn how today's data modelers are driving new value back into the business. Attendees will learn:

    * How to leverage data modeling for better integration
    * Why data modeling can improve business intelligence
    * What to look for in a good data modeler
    * How to dovetail business initiatives with data modeling
    * When to encourage a fresh look at data models

Register today.

Agile BI - Boston Seminar with Pentaho and Athena IT Solutions

Join Pentaho and Athena IT Solutions in Boston, to learn how Pentaho is revolutionizing the way BI applications are built and deployed. With tight budgets, limited headcount and more requests for vital information than ever before, we need new approaches to solve both old and new IT and business challenges, to avoid the costly and complex BI implementations of the past.  Pentaho’s Agile BI methodology combined with a commercial open source business model enables you to overcome these roadblocks and deliver successful BI solutions to business users more quickly and at significantly lower costs.

Date September 30, 2010

Time 8 am – Noon

Where Boston Marriot Newton 2345 Commonwealth Avenue Newton, Massachusetts 02466 (617) 969-1000

This seminar is designed both for business analysts and executives that wish to learn more about how Agile BI can positively impact your business as well as for technical staff involved in building BI solutions. The latter portion of the seminar will include an extensive, step-by-step training demonstration of a BI implementation from ETL to deployed dashboards.  This demonstration is strongly recommended for anyone involved in data integration and/or business intelligence projects.

Join us for our live ½ day seminar in Boston to:

•   Learn how your peers are succeeding with Open Source Business Intelligence

•   Learn how Agile BI enables greater collaboration between IT and business users

•   See how BI Applications can be deployed faster than ever 

 
Take part in a step-by-step training demonstration of an actual BI application implementation from data integration to the building and deploying of relevant reports and dashboards

This morning seminar will show you how to quickly and cost effectively arm your IT and business managers with the information they need to make the right decisions to grow your business and keep it competitive.

More information on our Boston area Pentaho consulting.

Data Warehousing in Healthcare

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming TDWI Boston Chapter meeting. All BI and DW professionals are welcome to attend. Please RSVP.

• When: July 22, 12:00 p.m.- 5:00 p.m.
• Where: Children's Hospital Boston
  1 Autumn St, Auditorium A
  Boston, MA
  
• Topics: "Data Warehousing & Healthcare" with presentations from practitioners, consultants, and educators including Community Healthcare Access Network of NH, Recombinant Data Corp., Brandeis University, and Oracle Corporation

Agenda

Please RSVP at http://tdwichapters.org/pages/boston/event-registration.aspx. Space is limited, so sign up early!