Wian Terblanche
I’ve been a huge fan of Ralph Kimball since I started my career in business intelligence and data warehousing. I still remember reading his book “The Data Warehouse Toolkit” like it was yesterday. Today one can only but wonder how many people use the Kimball methodology around the word…
Ralph Kimball is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. His books on dimensional design techniques have become the all time best sellers in data warehousing.
I remember subscribing to his design tips in the year 2000, it’s hard to imagine that he has been publishing these design tips for more than a decade now which brings me to the meat of this post. With permission from the Kimball Group I publish design tip # 121 as written by the Kimball Group Members
Design Tip #121 Columnar Databases: Game Changers for DW/BI Deployment?
Ralph Kimball
Although columnar RDBMSs have been in the market since the 1990s, the recent BI requirements to track rapidly growing customer demographics in enormous terabyte databases have made some of the advantages of columnar databases increasingly interesting. Continue reading »
Ash van der Spuy
I publish this story on behalf of Ash van der Spuy.
It’s been just over a year since IBM’s acquisition of Cognos has gone through on paper, and a lot has happened in this year. We saw the release of new versions of the BI ( 8.4, FP1, FP2 and 8.4.1), TM1 (9.5), and Controller suites. We also saw the launch of brand new products, like Cognos Express, Cognos 8 Mashup Service, and the lesser publicized Business Glossary for Cognos 8 BI. Continue reading »
Wian Terblanche
Gartner released their latest version of the Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems on 28 January 2010. There has been a lot of activity in this market with quite a few new trends & demands. Exploding data volumes, social media, the need for near real-time data warehousing & operational BI are just some of the movers and shakers.
Sybase IQ enters the leading quadrant for the first time – a first for the column oriented database industry. It has been around for about 14 years now and is the original and leading commercially available column oriented database. In the last few years there has been quite a few new players in this space with the likes of Vertica, ParAccel and SenSage to name a few.
Continue reading »
Wian Terblanche
IBM recently announced the availability of the InfoSphere Foundation Tools version 8.1.2. There are a number of new and exciting features.
The InfoSphere Foundation Tools is part of the bigger Information Server platform and consists of a number of different product modules. These modules actively share metadata with the rest of the Information Server platform. The InfoSphere Foundation Tools help profile, model, define, map and govern information that is spread across your enterprise, so your business can deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time.
I will summarize the major new features of four of these modules in this post – Business Glossary, Information Analyzer, FastTrack & Metadata Workbench.
Continue reading »
Social Networking
Authors: Puneet Gupta and Hutch Carpenter
Enterprise 2.0 continues to expand across businesses and enterprises. In a February 2009 article, consulting firm McKinsey writes that social software “could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s.”1 Market research firm Forrester projects an annual growth in Enterprise 2.0 expenditures of 43%. Continue reading »
Estelle de Beer
Written by Alex Kayle
Increasing collaboration and social media uptake is changing the face of BI, says B.I.Practice.
Companies are building data warehouses for a world that no longer exists, based on assumptions that are no longer there. So said Estelle de Beer, practice manager of the Sybase company, B.I.Practice, during the ITWeb Data Warehousing conference in Midrand, yesterday. Continue reading »
Jill Dyché
by Jill Dyché, BeyeNETWORK
For some time now, data has been moving around the enterprise at a faster pace. Banks, retailers, communications companies, healthcare providers and high-tech firms – they all have a more urgent need to share data across business applications, end users and core systems. The emergence of new technologies, most notably message bus solutions, facilitates these new levels of data exchange. But this data sharing reveals other problems, namely different versions of the same data. Continue reading »
Wayne Borcher
With the advent of new BI tools in the Web 2.0 era allowing interactivity and collaboration, users are increasingly being empowered to develop dimensional exploration of information from data warehouses, data marts, operational applications,etc. This self-service BI is now being fueled by the current economic downturn, where companies trying to cut costs are encouraging users to help them selves.
Continue reading »
Steering through recession
By David Binning, ComputerWeekly
Business intelligence is one of the few areas in the IT sector to have remained buoyant during the economic downturn, as organisations use the technology to help them reduce costs and optimise operations.
“At a time when there is a tendency to cut costs indiscriminately, smarter companies are using business intelligence tools to help them weather the turbulence,” says Helena Schwenk, senior analyst with Ovum’s software division.
Continue reading »
Information Management
Data visualization influences how users consume information
By Robert Kearse, Information Management Special Reports
In today’s organizations, one of upper management’s main goals is to maintain a steady process that provides decision-makers with access to critical business information aligned with corporate objectives. Success in any organization hinges on proper access to this information – not as an annual, quarterly, monthly or even weekly event; but as an ongoing, consistent and standard process that allows information to be readily available to decision-makers on demand.
Continue reading »
Follow InfoSphere on Twitter