In the early part of 2007, Neil Raden wrote an article entitled “Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable”. In this article, he argues that the a data warehouse (BI 1.0) is a big, slow, expensive machine for cranking out analytical data, and when it does, the data is highly-structured, only allowing a rigidly defined set of of questions to be answered. He continues that in the day of doing Google searches and social network…

Back in 2008, I was working for a telco in the Dominican Republic, consulting for their data warehouse team. I proposed a complete re-architecture of the data warehouse and the reporting platforms that the data warehouse supported. When I had to cost out the project, I had to include some hardware, primarily for the Ab Initio ETL tool we were going to migrate to, but also for the development and test servers, and more tape backup machines. All in all, the tab for the entire project grew to almost 2 million USD. It was just another reminder to me of how expensive a data warehouse can be…

In the first post I took a look at some of the challenges we faced within the data warehouse group that we hoped CAST could help us with. In this post, we will take a look at how the challenges were met by CAST.

The Solutions

To address the challenge of maintaining up-to-date, complete and accurate technical documentation of the data warehouse platform, CAST was used to analyze the production platform after every deliverable…

I recently worked with an organization where we had looked at a tool that was able to analyze all the source code for the ETL jobs of their data warehouse and provide several benefits to the organization as a result. The tool is called CAST, and comes from a company called Cast Software. During the presentation of the tool and its features by the CAST team, I was very impressed by what the tool could do in terms of analyzing source code, and even more, what it could do with the information gathered from that analysis …

It is quite obvious that there is no lack of innovative IT development processes, when one browses through the literature and blogs about software development methodologies. Few are those who would defend the waterfall approach …

In a previous post, I mentioned that one of the impacts of implementing a master data management system was removing some or all of the data integration responsibilities from the data warehouse. Since the data warehouse is the usual place for data integration, in particular customer data integration, I would like to explain myself and see if you agree, or at least see my point of view…