Introducing Agnostic Data Labs
Announcing Agnostic Data Labs – the new data solution automation platform to truly implemented data warehouse projects your way!
Category: Organisation
All posts about organising your Business Intelligence environment.
Key metrics for monitoring data logistics
A data logistics control framework tracks everything that happens in a data solution. A small number of key metrics can be used to keep informed of important exceptions.
Adopting GitHub for documentation, and resulting blog changes
After having used Git(Hub) to work and collaborate on code for a long time, I have recently spent some time to merge and move various documentation artefacts to GitHub as well. This covers the Data Integration framework and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) architecture documentation, most importantly the various Design Patterns and Solution Patterns. These patterns form the central body of content that actually try to explain how things work in practice. I think it makes a...
Some insights about … Insights
Can I get some insights, please? Over the years, I have come to somewhat dislike the term ‘insights’ almost to the same level as, say, a ‘Data Lake’. And that’s saying something. Not because these concepts themselves are related that much (they are to some extent, of course). But, because to me personally, they both conjure the same feeling: a mixture of annoyance and desperation. One of the reasons is that since the word ‘insights’...
Enterprise Architecture seminar thoughts
This posting is about the most complex object that humankind can come up with; an Enterprise. At least that is what John Zachman states at his one day seminar about Enterprise Architecture (physics 101 – Monday 23rd of August 2010 – Sydney). The first rule for the way of working is defined right at the start: when doing anything with an enterprise or start designing anything for an enterprise; make sure you understand the enterprise...
The importance of consistency
Some say it’s just being picky and that it slows down development. But strictly enforcing consistency in your BI / DWH environment will actually help to greatly speed up the whole development process. In discussions about standards, conventions, concession and consistency the argument usually is that being consistent only makes the system easier to manage for the system control (and they would think ‘why bother now, that’s not our problem’). And often people will say...
A plea against IT abbreviations and upper-casing
Every project I have worked on there is an abundance in abbreviations used for almost anything, from project names (codes) to mappings, (source) systems, workflows, team member names and database attributes. Even worse, the meaning of these abbreviations is lost or vague and in some cases even wrong (because the ‘real’ abbreviation is already taken)! Every time I feel it makes it so much harder for new team members to grasp the meaning of the system and/or...