Talking Book

Martyn Richard Jones, A Coruña, Spain.

To set the scene, get to the point, and give this thing the well-deserved impulse, impetus, and notoriety, I will begin like Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood—that is, at the beginning.

And for folk who struggle with big words? That’s the start.

So, to get things rolling modestly, I will explain where I am coming from with this demanding, triumphant and considered endeavour of mirth, myth and mysticism.

And, if that fails, we move on. Right? Right!

You see, I can abuse language and reality as well as any big daterer, data torturer or data masher. It is just that typically, and with a certain Celtic humility, honesty and Welsh holier-than-though arrogance, I choose not to.

I wrote an article some time ago titled Myth-busting: Data Mesh and Data Warehousing. In that subtly controversial piece, I tried vainly to appeal to the good sense, reason and decency of the data mesh folk, particularly concerning some of their negative and erroneous comments about data warehousing.

In addition, I skirted around the various stuff we used to do in the age of Big Iron and in the contrived transitioning period to open tech, open source, and everything.

To refresh the memories of the puzzled or perplexed reader, what I wrote was this:

I am quite a fan of many aspects under the Data Mesh umbrella. However, when it comes to a proper fact-based understanding and analysis of the history, place and architecture (business, data and technical) of Data Warehousing, the leading exponents of data mesh have it, in my opinion, woefully wrong.

Since publishing that piece, there has been a veritable surfeit of new thick, obnoxious, and hateful anti-data warehousing and anti-history flim-flam sauce to wade through to try and comprehend, analyse, and eventually discard so much naïve dreck.

So, this new polemic combines many arguments from that article and addresses the hostile, misinformed, and inaccurate representation by certain systems integrators and IT service companies of data mesh and data warehousing.

To underline this point, this new screed, which includes previously aired views, is still about setting the record straight and getting hostile detractors to think, rethink and reassess. I also hope some points of view entertain you when channelled through the spirits of the once mighty Pete and Dud.

Moreover, if you believe data warehousing is as dead as a Norwegian Blue, please read on!