In a recent article by Wayne W. Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research, entitled “Operational BI: Sorting Out Your Options”, the options are given for providing near realtime business intelligence. The point of the article seems to be that you can have your BI either fast or of high quality, but not both. Given that a data [...]
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 previous post, we took a look at the solution CAST brought to our challenges and how good those solutions were in bringing real benefit to the organization. Here, we will take a look at some of the other things we didn’t do (for one reason or another) that we could have to reap [...]
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 …