Integrating Data -- Perpetually

You don't have to be part of a worldwide organization to have users who need information at their fingertips around the clock. And the mushrooming amount of business data accumulating at companies large and small is getting, in a phrase, hard to manage.But there might be a solution -- and one that won't shred through your IT budget. We bring it to you this week in a story from Michael Jennings that comes our way from Business Intelligence Pipeline's sister publication, Intelligent Enterprise. Jennings takes us through the ins and outs of the operational data store (ODS), giving a full account of how the ODS is more simple than a traditional data warehouse, how it can provide improvements to overall information availability, and why he thinks the benefits of the ODS should convince some data management professionals to make it the centerpiece of their entire enterprise information universe.

And here's another story worth checking this week: We have a very cool visual tour of Microsoft's Windows Vista December pre-beta 2 release, which will take you through the new user interface detail-by-detail. It's not strictly about business intelligence, but if you use Windows at your business, it's definitely worth a look.