New Year Meanderings...

Searching for BI. MDM is for real. Multi-flavored data warehouses. It's why we love Google. As the title suggests, these are truly meanderings...

Searching for BI

Sitting in on a Cognos event recently, the speaker, a Cognos global marketing manager, asked the attendants how many people used the Go! Search feature (which lets users search up, down and across BI content and other corporate information). Nobody seemed to raise their hand - which had the presenter scratching his head: "Maybe we need to look into the pricing," he quipped...My suggestion to Cognos and others: persist and permeate (but price reasonably, of course), because the ability to search existing BI (and related) content is truly valuable to all of us. Yes, security considerations and runaway searches could complicate and compromise things, but think of its impact on the endless proliferation of reports and the resultant head-aches to IT and business alike.

MDM is For Real

I'm not saying that this was an open question - and neither do I wish to trivialize it - but there's no doubt (in my mind, at least) that building a case for taking out "master" tables from a database and putting those into another database - and then selling this is an expensive must-have stand-alone solution - had to have been quite an uphill task. Kudos to Journee, Kalido, Siperian and others for their creativity and persistence in making it happen.

Multi-flavored Data Warehouses

Moving beyond boring, vanilla data warehouses ("What will you have? Inmon or Kimball?") into exciting options such as data warehouse appliances and column-store data warehouses - what's not to like about that? It's a loud call for data warehouse architects - that flock of undiscovered, underrated and underpaid wizards - to try and stay apace with vendor offerings. Now, if only there were some place other than work that they could go to learn...

It's Why We Love Google

On a different note: Google wants to take away your desktop... for better. Google's new Native Client is an experiment aimed at allowing users to run native x86 applications safely within the browser. This raises ominous questions for desktop stalwarts like Microsoft, potentially interesting challenges for virtualization, and new, exciting possibilities for the rest of us. The best part of it all? The name, NaCl, which appeals deeply to the nerd within me (although Chemistry was by far not my strongest suit).

Welcome to 2009! Yours truly, RajanSearching for BI. MDM is for real. Multi-flavored data warehouses. It's why we love Google. As the title suggests, these are truly meanderings...