Pick the fast lane!

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Using Data Warehouse Automation is very much like picking the fast lane. Don't get bogged down, find out more about Data Warehouse Automation today.

Liked on YouTube: Evaluating New Tools

Evaluating New Tools
Visit http://upside.tdwi.org for more information. Software tools are too feature heavy. Mark Madsen, president of Third Nature, explains why learnability, response time, and aesthetics should top your evaluation criteria.
via YouTube http://youtu.be/0jJTYYZ-tNs

Do You Want a Ship in Dry Dock or a Fully Ocean Going Vessel?

I was recently asked by a prospective reseller partner if BIReady could satisfy his customer's specific requirement.

Apparently, his customer figured they could not afford to build a fully-fledged data warehouse, and so were happy to settle for an Operational Data Store (ODS) - in other words, just landing some tables from their source systems on to another server for reporting without impacting the running of their transactional systems.

When I explained that the whole point of Data Warehouse Automation is so that the customer CAN afford a data warehouse, he explained that the customer was quite specific about the requirement and would not change their point of view.

So let me get this straight...

They want (and presumably need) a data warehouse, but think they cannot afford it.
But they would consider buying a Data Warehouse Automation tool (BIReady), but not use it to actually build a data warehouse, just land the data from the sources.

As I explained to the prospective partner, it's like saying "We want to buy a ship, but we don't want to take it out to sea, we just want it to sit in a dry-dock."

In this case, BIReady builds a fully ocean-going vessel in a fraction of the time and cost of building a ship by any other means. With BIReady, you can have a fully operational Enterprise Data Warehouse with as many data marts as you like in less than the time needed to build an ODS alone.

This is a big problem for those of us selling Data Warehouse Automation solutions - people don't get it!

BI Managers and their developers make the same erroneous conclusion that no software product can design and build a data warehouse faster/better/cheaper than a human being.

I seem to recall a school history lesson about a group of people saying the same thing about automated weaving machines a couple of hundred years ago, saying the cotton gin and the spinning jenny could never replace human textile weavers.

No matter how much things change, they always seem to remain the same.

Five Things You Should Know About Data Warehouse Automation

Data Warehouse Automation tools are becoming more mainstream now for their obvious benefits:- Fast delivery times, lower cost of development, better decisions being made sooner. 

At last, businesses are waking up to the fact that waiting three to six months for a Business Intelligence project to complete is no longer acceptable.

There are quite a few Data Warehouse Automation tools on the marketplace right now, but like many things, they are not all created equal. Here are some things you should know if evaluating products from different vendors.

1)      Some Tools Don’t Automate Everything!

Some Data Warehouse Automation tools make the same mistake that most developers make – and that is to make the star-schema for reporting the sole objective. That’s fine for a simple data source, but when you need to combine data from multiple data sources, things get complicated...

Read more...