Category: Editorial
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BI Convention over Configuration
The convention over configuration discussion when designing a data warehouse often leads to fanatical discussions by technical people over the ‘best’ approach to do things. Convention can be used to define the standard way to design a data model (see Process Neutral Data Modelling) or to implement an ETL transformation (for example a reducing sets approach)…
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Version Control on Rails
In my consultancy assignments, I usually work in large organisations that have outsourced IT departments and very formal processes for everything. One aspect of this is version control. In such an organisation every document contains a long table near the beginning with a row for every change, who made the change and when it was…
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Can Business Intelligence Be Agile ?
The agile manifesto and it’s underlying principles set out four key values for developing software solutions: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan If an organisation is willing to accept these values for software development then how much more important should adoption of them be for…
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Connections – A Life In The Day
An interview for recruitment company Connections who ran an occasional series entitled “Connections – A Life In The Day” – and yes it was deliberately backwards Download Connections – A Life in the Day of David-Walker now
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Sequent – Values & Principles
Sequent was a hardware vendor that pioneered high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) open systems between 1983 and 1999 when it was acquired by IBM. I was lucky enough to work for Sequent between 1992 and 1995. In its heyday it operated by a set of values and principles that created a great work environment because individuals who worked at the company…
Data Management & Warehousing 