29 Tuesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Data’s most significant challenges today are multifaceted and affect organizations across various industries. Here are some of the most important ones:
Continue reading25 Friday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
The biggest challenge facing IT today can vary depending on the organization and context, but several common themes often emerge:
Continue reading17 Thursday Oct 2024
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“I was a fool and what i’ve seen has made me two fools.”
Rafael Alberti, Spanish poet
Friends, Europeans, and fellow citizens, it’s time that we all spoke out against wrongdoing, criminality, and impunity. It’s time we took a stand against injustice wherever we find it. And it’s time to say that enough is enough.
Dud: Pete, did data exist before data warehousing?
Continue reading17 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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AI, cloud, data, data-at-rest, data-engineering, data-in-motion, information, knowledge, News, structured intellectual capital
Narrator: What is data in motion, and what is data at rest? More to the point, what’s the difference?
Continue reading16 Wednesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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bad-data-bible, data, film, information, knowledge, Poetry, relationships, the-big-data-contrarian, updates, writing
Narrator: How do you raise a data child to be a great, honest, committed data professional? That is the question.
Continue reading15 Tuesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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Architecture, data, design, english, english-grammar, grammar, information, language, Management, writing
Narrator: To know data, you must know the grammar of data, information and knowledge. Depending on the language and its precision, accuracy, and richness, we will have a reasonable idea of approaching data and information modelling issues. To know data and information, you must understand the business well. People with a technical background and little or no business knowledge are often oblivious to their ignorance regarding business data and information. When you have a technician in the industry who doesn’t understand this, it’s a problem. If your technician is located thousands of kilometres from your company, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Let’s listen to Pete and Dud wax lyrical about the importance of language and grammar.
Continue reading14 Monday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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AI, blog, education, psychology, writing
Narrator: In past times of crisis, we depended more on who we considered to be experts. These days, rightly or wrongly, we have become more cynical about experts and their expert analysis and advice.
An old Russian proverb urges us “to trust and verify.”
Continue reading14 Monday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, Cariño, 14th October 2024
Narrator: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the fabulous Mel Brooks.
Dole Officer: “Occupation?”
Citizen: “Standup-Philosopher!”
Dole Officer: “What?”
Citizen: “Standup Philosopher. I coalesce the vapours of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension.”
Dole Officer: “Oh! A bullshit artist!”
Continue reading14 Monday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, The Data Contrarian, Cariño, Monday 14th October 2024.
Narrator: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the fabulous Mel Brooks.
Dole Officer: “Occupation?”
Citizen: “Standup-Philosopher!”
Dole Officer: “What?”
Citizen: “Standup Philosopher. I coalesce the vapours of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension.”
Continue reading10 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, Santander, 10th October 2024
Narrator: The development method for data warehousing, whether following Inmon or Kimball, has always been iterative with apparent aspects of self-service, agility, rapid development and end-user development.
Dud: We always built data warehouses iteratively, didn’t we, Pete?
Pete: Yes, that’s right, Dud. Iterations are delivered in increments. Small enough to be quickly deliverable. Large enough to be significant to the business.
Continue reading10 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, Santoña, 10th October 2024.
Narrator: Do minimum viable and acceptable products exist in data warehousing? That’s the question.
Continue reading06 Sunday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Dud: Why do some jokers claim data warehousing is just about technology?
Continue reading04 Friday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
“Great things in business are never done by one person;
they’re done by a team of people.”
Steve Jobs
Martyn Richard Jones, Tours, 4th October 2024
Narrator: There is a widespread belief amongst the know-it-all crowd that data warehousing and business intelligence necessarily mean monolithic and siloed teams. And that the only way of moving away from such team organisations is to kill off data warehousing. But is this really a rational, coherent, and cohesive approach, as some people say it is? Or is it destructive stupidity born out of conceit, ignorance, and arrogance?
Continue reading03 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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Martyn Richard Jones
“Logistics is all of war-making, except shooting the guns, releasing the bombs, and firing the torpedoes.”
ADM Lynde D. McCormick, USN
Martyn Richard Jones, Córdoba, 3rd October 2024
Narrator: Here is a billion-dollar question: Can Agile-to-Scale be effectively used to fight a war, a regional conflict, or a global existential threat?
Continue reading03 Thursday Oct 2024
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Martyn Richard Jones, Madrid, 3rd October 2023
Narrator: Relational database theory is over fifty years old. Relational database technologies go back more than four decades. Some claim that relational databases were first used for online transaction processing applications. Say what?
Continue reading02 Wednesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, Bilbao, 2nd October 2024
Narrator: Not all data we have is related to strictly business domains such as products, organisation structure and corporate real estate. A lot of data we collect is simply about monitoring all aspects of IT, applications, networking, security and governance. To name just a few.
Dud: What’s all this data in my exhaust? Is my data back-end going well, or do I have a mechanical data governance issue? All this OLTP exhaust data is so tedious and tiring.
Continue reading29 Sunday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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Martyn Jones, Manhattan, 29th September 2024
Narrator: According to some data-mesh folk, data warehousing is “a data management construct that dates back to the eighties,” I have a problem with that. It’s as if that was somehow a bad thing. Is it? For me, that’s quite a weak argument that, in a way, treats people as if they were idiots.
It is like someone asking Newton, “So, Sir Isaac, you don’t still believe in that old gravity nonsense, do you?”
Continue reading27 Friday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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Analytics, cloud, comedy, data, data science, databases, enterprise data warehousing, fiction, humor, information, knowledge, Organisational Autism, short-story, statistics
Martyn Jones, Brooklyn, 27th September 2024
Narrator: Another false meme doing the rounds is that Data Warehousing necessarily means monolithic databases. This is not what data warehouses have been for many businesses.
Continue reading26 Thursday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, New Jersey
Narrator: Here, in this piece, we wander down Differential Avenue to look at what people consider domain and subject orientation. This story is about the good, the embarrassingly lousy hyperbole and then the ugliest provocative nonsense.
Continue reading25 Wednesday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Just because you can say it doesn’t mean that you can do it
Martyn Jones, New York, 25th September 2024
Narrator: There is a fascinating famous saying, “Just because you can write something, draw something, or say something, doesn’t mean that you can do it”, that I think could be further explored in the context of data and analytics. It seems to go hand in hand with expressions such as “It must be true because I read it on the internet”. Also, it can be pretty surprising how many businesses expect their people to lie where it’s practical and commercially beneficial.
Continue reading24 Tuesday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Narrator: Data Warehousing is an excellent integrator; it is the cohesive melting pot of data and the best-known way of providing multiple valid versions of the truth depending on who is looking at the data, when they are doing so, and from what perspective.
Continue reading23 Monday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Physician, heal thyself!
Narrator: Consider this. If the originators, acolytes and sycophants of data mesh hadn’t been so free and easy with how they created and perpetrated technical debt, especially data model and data quality-related technical debt, then we wouldn’t need data mesh to try and get us out of the mess these sloppy developer people put us into in the first place.
Continue reading22 Sunday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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“Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
Plato
Narrator: Let us start with a softball question. The kind that even your granny could have knocked out of the park.
How does a business describe the value it gets from accessing and analysing fresh quality data to decide what is strategically, tactically and operationally preferable for the future of the industry?
It’s not a trick question, but a tricky one that is as hard to grasp and come to terms with as a mightily greasy piglet with a very questioning tail.
What do Pete and Dud think about that? Get ready kiddies. Let’s take a peek…
Continue reading21 Saturday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
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Narrator: It doesn’t matter what you are trying to do, or even if you know what you are trying to do, but if in doubt, blame the quality of the data. There was a time when data quality was a massive impediment to business data integration.
Data quality assurance was a glint in IT’s eye. A far-away place that nobody knew how to get to.
Continue reading