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Fall Events Lineup

I'm headed to Las Vegas, first for the Teradata Partners conference, then for the IBM Information on Demand conference. Both look like great events. Two weeks at the Mandalay Bay hotel might be overkill though.

After that I'm off to Orland for the fall TDWI in Orlando where I'll do the full day ETL evalution session. This time around we have Informatica, Oracle and the open source company Talend doing demos. It will be an interesting comparison. I'm also doing the keynote on Thursday where I'll be talking about BI, the future and what a mess emerging technology and culture are going to make, with little history thrown in for fun.

Then the European TDWI conference in Amsterdam, followed by TTI's portal conference in Rome. The European lineup will be fun since I'm talking about open source BI and data warehousing, web 2.0, web data extraction and web scraping. Emerging technology is always interesting stuff.

Look me up if you're going to any of these events. Lots to talk about.

Labels: events, ibm, TDWI, teradata

Posted by Mark Friday, October 05, 2007 10:23:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Slides for Data Federation/EII Uses and Abuses

I just uploaded the slides for the data federation/Enterprise Information Integration uses and abuses webcast to SlideShare (embedded below). You can also follow this link to the archived webcast if you want to listen to the talk. Minimal text on the pages so that is probably your best option if you want the details.

Labels: data federation, data integration, EII, events, webcast

Posted by Mark Saturday, August 04, 2007 2:20:00 PM | permalink | (18) comments

Mashup Camp 4, Day 1

I'm at Mashup Camp 4 this week. Tired. Who starts a conference with breakfast at 7:30 AM and runs it until 6:00 PM? Based on today, someone who's wrangled lots of smart people to talk about leading edge technology.

Bottom line: lots of sexy UI stuff like Zude going on, less focus on the data integration, but more than I expected. Enjoyed the SnapLogic presentation, not so much because they are innovative (they are, but there are a half-dozen other entries in the general web integration market) but because they have a freely downloadable server-based open source offering. This circumvents one of the complaints I have about Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and OpenKapow: you can run your own server, where the others are services that host for you with no option of running your own server. (closed Kapow costs a lot, does more and runs inside your firewall).

Saw Google Gears demo of an application running online and off. That's some interesting stuff and it's still very early. Given the flakiness of the conference wifi, more people could have benefited from offline browsing.

Also excited because I just got my invite for the Google Mashup Editor so I can play around. So many things to try out, so little time. I'd love to integrate LignUp with one of the open source BI tools and build some fun voice-enable BI alerter demos.

Overall quality of demos and talks was high, with interesting things from both small startups and big companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Labels: events, mashup camp

Posted by Mark Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:21:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

List of Data Integration Webcast Links for This Year

Here are links to replays for all the webcasts I've done during the past year.

The Hybrid Data Warehouse: Extending the BI Environment with Data Federation
Webcast: 3/21/07

Challenges and Techniques When Hand-coding ETL
Webcast: 6/26/07

Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) Market Overview and Directions
Webcast: 6/13/07

Enterprise Information Integration Technologies: Common Uses and Abuses
Webcast: 2/14/07

Enterprise Integration Series: Evaluation Criteria for Selecting ETL Tools
Webcast: 8/2/06

Labels: data federation, data integration, EII, etl, events, webcasts

Posted by Mark Monday, July 09, 2007 11:58:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

Web Integration Talk in Las Vegas

I'm off to Las Vegas for the Portals, Collaboration and Content Conference to give a talk on data integration for the web. Title of the talk is "Web Data Integration: Methods to Extract and Deliver Data for Portals and Web Applications." I'll be doing a run-through of integration architecture and technology choices to get data from where it is to where you want it. I had to cut back on the part that I find most interesting, getting data off web pages. Scraping, scrAPIs, RSS and the rest of the fun web stuff gets about 10-15 minutes towards the end. I'll probably repurpose the unused information into posts. The slides will make their way online some time in the next couple weeks. I can say one thing - they're pretty relative to some of the other presentations.

Labels: BI, data integration, events, portals

Posted by Mark Monday, May 21, 2007 9:03:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

Redo: Open Source Talk at Portland DAMA

I'll be back in Portland this week to give a talk on open source in data warehousing. The last one was cancelled due to a snowstorm (scroll to see video). Hopefully this one will fare better.

The talk is an abbreviated version of of the session I'll be running at the Boston TDWI in mid-May. A portion of the talk is basic technology theory, designed to help you convince managers that open source in the BI market is inevitable. The rest is a fast run-through of open source projects at the different architectural layers and then information about adoption and risk. 120 slides in 120 minutes, which means I'll be moving fast to cover everything.

Sadly, no demos in the session. They had to be cut to make the two hour deadline.

Labels: dama, events, open source

Posted by Mark Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:23:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

When to Consolidate and When to Federate

The will be on data consolidation versus virtualization and the fact that we're starting to need both in the data warehouse (hence the "hybrid data warehouse" in the title).

On-demand access to current data or operational details requires some rethinking of infrastructure. If we want to physically consolidate the data then we need to rethink the extract mechanisms, schemas, storage models and even delivery interfaces to client applications.

The assumption is no longer true that data should always be stored in a central warehouse database. We have technologies that open up access to whole new realms of data: spreadsheets, files, web pages, messages, XML, images, standard industry formats. Centralizing this content isn’t required to manage the schema and relationships for these things – often it can’t.

Data federation / EII tools provide an option that lets us centralize most of the data, but provide access to information that can't easily be consolidated. Unlike direct access to the native sources, these tools allow us to mediate access and provide a single point of management and reuse.

The webcast will go into some more detail on methods of consolidation and where federated access makes sense. Wednesday at 9:00 AM, Pacific.

Labels: data federation, data integration, EII, events

Posted by Mark Sunday, March 18, 2007 7:11:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Fire Arts Festival in July (and other events worth going to)

The Fire Arts Festival (*fire*, not fine) looks like a pyro's dream conference. I may be in the bay area at the right time, in which case I'm going to try to wrangle a ticket to the event. The pre-conference classes are as interesting as the festival, covering everything from electomechanics to concrete sculpture. Hot damn!

While I'm on the topic of events, South by Southwest (SXSW) is getting started. Another place I wish I could be instead of where I am now. My particular interest is SXSW Interactive - with sessions like "the real story behind snakes on a plane" and "AJAX or Flash: What's Right for You?" there's something for everyone.

Labels: events

Posted by Mark Friday, March 09, 2007 11:21:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

Upcoming BI/DW Events (I'll be attending)

Now that I'm back to regularly scheduled business, first up is events for this year.

My cancelled DAMA talk on open source BI and DW (exciting video below) will be rescheduled . It was cancelled due to the freak snowstorm that paralyzed the city. I missed all the car wrecks because I was dragging a suitcase 30 blocks up a deserted street to a bus stop for one of the few buses that hadn't stopped running yet. [video at the end of this post]

I'll be doing a webcast for TDWI on February 14 titled "Enterprise Information Integration Technologies: Uses and Abuses" where I'll talk a little about EII technology and then go through various scenarios and use-cases for EII tools. This touches on both BI-related and non-BI topics since the EII vendors are moving to be broader SOA enabling companies. TDWI requires registration for the webcasts which can be done from their webinar series page - just click the links of the webcasts you're interested (namely this one).

Also in February, I'll be teaching the ETL tool evaluation course at TDWI's conference in Las Vegas. On Monday I'll be in the executive summit for the Business Intelligence 2.0 panel session.

Some time later this spring I'll be doing another with a tentative title of "The Hybrid Warehouse: Extending the BI Environment with Data Federation", with a focus on extending the integration capabilities of the data warehouse/BI environment to address on-demand, event-driven and non-relational data.

Then in May there's the Shared Insights Portals, Collaboration and Content Conference which doesn't have their schedule up yet. I'll be giving a talk titled "Web Data Integration: Methods to Extract and Deliver Data for Portals and Web Applications" Really, this talk ought to be called something like "ETL for the web" since I'll be talking about how to get data to your portal, portlet or whatever data consumer or UI widget you have handy. I'll probably talk some protocols and APIs, but spend more time looking at scrAPIs and vendors starting to offer tools to help us deal with the vast data resource that is the web.

May also has the Boston TDWI conference (no schedule page yet) whre I'll do another round of the ETL course, hopefully with some major updates. I'll also have an entire day of open source BI and DW. This session will be great, with demos from Pentaho, Jasper and hopefully two other open source providers, a panel session and a run through some OSS BI comparisons.

Last on my list is MashupCamp 4 in Silicon Valley in July, where I'll be an attendee though I may do some sort of talk on integrating with BI, DW or databases if that's something that people want to hear about.

Now the video you've been waiting for. Portland, Oregon - winter wonderland.


That first driver looked like he was deliberately crashing based on the engine revving and acceleration.

Labels: BI, conference, events, webcast

Posted by Mark Thursday, January 25, 2007 9:52:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments