Over my career, I have developed a few strongly-held design beliefs, and one came up in conversation recently, during a spirited discussion on minimal quality requirements for a[ny] data mart. I hold that the data copied from source to destination must be provably correct and complete with little effort. When agile-ly rolling staged deliverables into production, I may not have all the attributes in place for full flexibility of drill down, but if you have [say] 1248 records in the…
I've had to respond to this question, inside and outside of the company, in a number of different conversations over the past few days. It's interesting, because this is one of those conversations where semantics mean a lot - what people say is just as important as what people don't say. I only mean that people assume their listeners have precisely the same understanding of the concepts - which is often a mistake. Case in point - who owns the…
I've heard from a couple of friends about some "classic" project requests - dilemmas they have recently faced. These unreasonable requests can be turned into something achievable and, potentially, more relevant / meaningful to the requestor, by approaching the problem from a different direction. Request for Data: the Analytics Project Classic scenario #1 arrives courtesy of the external Experts, analytic genii (sic) promising to reveal secrets of profitability and sources of revenue buried deep within our data sets. Their "simple…