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ELT vs. ETL: Much Ado about Something

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, January 31, 2008
5:10 PM

My recent blog post on Informatica not only led to what an ITBusinessEdge.com blog called a "mini-buzz" about the fate of the company, it invited reader comments that, among other things, took up opposing points of view on Informatica's ELT capabilities — and, yes, that's extract-load-transform (also called "pushdown") not conventional extract-transform-load (ETL). There's no doubt that ELT is now a mainstream capability, and Informatica's inclusion of pushdown optimization in the recently released PowerCenter version 8.5 brings ELT the legitimacy it deserves.

Continue reading "ELT vs. ETL: Much Ado about Something"

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Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
11:14 AM

I’m a fan of network visualizations, by which I mean display of interconnectedness mined from disparate sources. The subject matter could be just about anything: witness the collection of projects at Manuel Lima’s VisualComplexity site. Social networks inferred from on-line media prove particularly interesting, the sort of stuff you’ll find in static form at Jeffrey Heer’s and Danah Boyd’s vizster site and dynamically in Linkinfluence’s Map of the Political Blogosphere, which I wrote about last month. Silobreaker (as an on-line application) takes these efforts a big step further.

Silobreaker visualizations add huge value to the company’s underlying news-aggregation service. They classify nodes by type. If you hover your mouse cursor over a node, you can explore its connectedness, and if you hover over the node’s text, you can learn more about that node, whether it represents a person, company, key phrase, or other type of entity. Hover over a link (edge) and you’ll see “documents indicating a relationship.” Naturally, you can double-click on a node to remake the visualization. Please, visit the site yourself and explore… and do some searches on terms that interest you. Then try the 360° Search, which aggregates content related to the search topic and displays retrieved and analyzed information via a variety of widgets.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
9:54 AM

Business Objects announced today that its founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Bernard Liautaud, has resigned from those roles and will join SAP's supervisory board in June. With the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP all but complete and the BI agenda being set, at best, by committee, Liautaud is heading for the exit (a well-trod path for executives in his shoes), free to enjoy the well-earned spoils of his success.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
7:40 AM

My thanks to our friend James Robertson for pointing to an important UK study that debunks many of the "Web 2.0" and "Google Generation" myths that currently abound. I have bit of a reputation as a cynic, but the Google Generation is something of which I have simply seen no real evidence, despite vendors and fellow analysts arguing loudly about its importance in today's workplace.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
11:40 AM

This week I'm speaking at the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Francisco. I did the Keynote presentation at the summer conference in Austin, Texas, and will be providing the Keynote at this conference as well. So, what does enterprise architecture have to do with SaaS? Plenty, and those who plan, work, and build their enterprise architectures today will ignore SaaS at their peril.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Monday, January 28, 2008
3:40 PM

Lombardi held an analyst conference call last week in advance of today's press releases — a relatively new format for them — to discuss their executive reorganization against the backdrop of their 2007 results and 2008 strategy. Rod Favaron, CEO (and, until last week, President) and Phil Gilbert, President (formerly CTO) gave us the update. The press releases are here and here.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, January 25, 2008
3:24 PM

Last week Cognos announced the release of Cognos 8.3, its flagship business intelligence platform. The latest release includes a number of improvements both for end users and administrators. Although it is a point release, I'd venture to say it's the biggest since Cognos 8 first shipped in November 2005. Here's my take on highlights and gaps…

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, January 25, 2008
10:48 AM

My colleague Jarrod forwarded a link to a news story of how one person deliberately destroyed seven years' worth of corporate content/data with ease. Meanwhile, I had another tab open, regarding the White House's inability/refusal to archive e-mail messages, and had just finished reading about the loss of a laptop containing the personal details of 600,000 people — quite a busy day for data destruction.

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Thursday, January 24, 2008
3:17 PM

Omniture completed its acquisition of Visual Sciences last week. So where does that leave HBX customers? For the party line, you can check out the HBX migration FAQ. After reading through it, my guess is that you'll have a bunch of questions. As suggested on the site in a number of places, "contact your account or services manager." Well, here are some of the questions I'd ask if I were in your position:

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
11:23 PM

Prof. David Farber has issued an interesting challenge:

Endlessly people talk about the Next Generation Internet. In fact the term has been used so badly that it is meaningless. I need a name for the Internet-like network we will need when we are faced with end to end optical communications at hundreds of gigabits; multi-core computers (large number) and other now-research technologies.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
11:12 AM

Despite this country's credit crisis, it appears there are still plenty of big-money bets being placed on emerging information technologies. This morning alone I've seen hefty sums put into data warehouse appliances, complex event processing (CEP) and master data management (MDM). Knowing a thing or two about each market, I'd say they are far from subprime investments.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
2:07 PM

SAP announced they achieved an ownership milestone to move forward with their acquisition of Business Objects and the formation of new subsidiary of SAP focusing on business user needs like BI and Performance Management along with Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). The acquisition of Business Objects has enabled SAP to accumulate a significant number of customers and technologies and bring new scale to their efforts. The market demand for supporting management processes has finally gained front-and-center importance for SAP and their future growth as it has for other large enterprise software providers IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, January 21, 2008
2:29 PM

As announced last week, Salesforce.com's Force.com Development-as-a-Service presents "a new set of development tools and APIs that enable enterprise developers to easily harness the promise of cloud computing. Providing full access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com Platform, Development-as-a-Service unites the productivity of development and IT collaboration tools with the power of Force.com Platform-as-a-Service."

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, January 18, 2008
12:46 PM

Were the holidays only two weeks ago? They seem a distant memory with so many BI headlines this week alone. SAP and Business Objects announced a number of joint bundles, Cognos launched 8.3, and MicroStrategy kicked off its annual user conference in Miami. The frenetic pace of BI continues in 2008.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, January 18, 2008
12:16 PM

Are you an Oracle or BEA customer trying to make sense of the combination? Forrester's John Rymer and Mike Gilpin have written an extensive analysis of the overlaps and of which products are likely to prevail. Oracle is promising long-term support for BEA products whether they're continued or not. But eventually, say the authors, "carrots and sticks" are likely to prod customers toward the preferred, go-forward products.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, January 17, 2008
4:27 PM

The acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems, right on the heels of the Oracle-BEA merger, is great news for everyone. After languishing on the sidelines for years, Sun has, in a single stroke, reclaimed its relevance, taken the open source movement a step further, and opened up new (and promising) options for customers. It's like Sun shaking us by the shoulders, saying "Wake up; I have some good news for you."

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
1:45 PM

The big news today is that Oracle is buying BEA. Everyone saw this coming, but I offered my take on "Why Oracle Needs This Deal" last October. The question is, what will Oracle do with BEA, and how will this help or hurt BEA and Oracle customers?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
12:11 PM

All the talk was about performance management, performance management, performance management at yesterday's Cognos 8.3 launch in New York, but most of the upgrades are about good old business intelligence. There were a few notable performance management-oriented tidbits, but the real appeal of Cognos 8.3 is in a handful of business-user-friendly upgrades aimed at democratizing reporting and analysis.

Posted by Nelson King
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
9:45 AM

"What about NetBeans?" A reader gently asked in response to Monday's blog filled with encomiums for Eclipse, but no mention of Sun's premiere IDE, NetBeans. I felt like a Pandora who not only did not wish to open the box, but ignored the existence of the box. That blog was meant to wave a small flag for IT folks to take a look around the shop and see how many projects they have that use the Eclipse Platform in one fashion or another. Then consider how they might better support them. There wasn't a point, or space, for getting into the festering history of Sun (and the Java Community Process) and IBM (and the Eclipse Consortium). Still, it could have been mentioned.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, January 14, 2008
9:53 AM

The best analysis of the motivations and implications of Microsoft's bid for Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) is Stephen Arnold's, yet his in-depth look, along with the rest of the reporting I've read, has nothing to say about some of the most interesting technology that Microsoft will acquire. Sure, given about FAST that "Our Business is Enterprise Search," and given that enterprise-search mojo and customers are what Microsoft seeks to acquire. There's much more to FAST, however: a fresh approach to data warehousing, a search-integrated BI dashboard, and an ad-delivery platform, that last being where the real search money is to be made.

Posted by Nelson King
Monday, January 14, 2008
9:10 AM

After starting a third review in a row of a software development environment based on the Eclipse platform (PyDev, Adobe Flex 3, and Nexaweb Enterprise Suite), something a friend said to me a year or two ago rang true: "There will be two major players in development software: Microsoft and its tools and Eclipse and its tools." A cynic might say, "Good for Eclipse, not bad at all for a camel built by a committee," but to make a point, cynics are often unfair and inaccurate.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Thursday, January 10, 2008
10:11 AM

So EMC (read: Documentum) acquired Document Sciences. The announcement came over the holiday period and has been the topic of chatter in the blogosphere. It's an acquisition that makes perfect sense for EMC as it continues to reposition Documentum away from the traditional complex document management activities that established the firm — a market that is under attack from Microsoft and Open Text — and more into high-value, transactional document management and archiving.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
5:37 PM

ParAccel has won well-deserved attention in recent months, including Intelligent Enterprise recognition as a Company to Watch. They're a start-up that boasts an all-star cast of executives, positioned in a hot category, namely column-store DBMSes that are optimized for analytics. There's irony, however, in their market positioning. It's not that column stores, most notably SybaseIQ, have been around for decades. It's that ParAccel chose to explain their product with an application, analysis of U.S. Census data, that is essentially owned by a competing column-store system, SuperSTAR from Space-Time Research.

I have personal history here: I designed the U.S. Census Bureau's Census 2000 tabulation system, working on subcontract to IBM. Back in 1998, I wrapped up the selection of SuperSTAR over competing options. We chose SuperSTAR for superior performance and ease of use. I then led the development team that created a system that supported both ad-hoc queries and the production of hundreds of billions of statistical tables for subsequent publication via the Census Bureau's American FactFinder Web site.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
2:16 PM

Informatica was recently named among "The Dozen" most influential companies driving the intelligent enterprise in our just-published 2008 Editors' Choice Awards. As a contributor to the nominations, I too had recommended Informatica. Why, then, this apparent volte-face, and why does it matter to you? Very simple: I believe Informatica is at perhaps the most important crossroads in its recent history, and as a current or potential Informatica customer, you too are invested in Informatica's future.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, January 7, 2008
11:48 AM

As 2007 came to a close, Gartner issued its long-awaited 2007 Magic Quadrant on Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). Gartner's previous BPMS Quadrant was issued in June 2006, so nearly 18 months had lapsed in its review cycle. No matter, 22 BPMS vendors — or at least the ten in the top-right quadrant — now had reason to celebrate. Or did they? It wasn't long after the Dec. 14 publication of the report (available from Quadrant leaders Pegasystems and Lombardi) that I received a call from an irate vendor.

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, January 7, 2008
9:47 AM

I had an experience over the holidays that provided me with a clear example of a downside of SaaS that I had not previously considered. The fact is that some "SaaS" players are fly-by-night companies with all of the creditability of a porn site, and perhaps fewer scruples. When you're dealing with unscrupulous SaaS players, they can hide behind the anonymity of the Web and thus are able to take your money and not deliver. Typically these SaaScammers are very difficult, if not impossible, to contact, locate and thus resolve an issue.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, January 4, 2008
12:43 PM

I was recently asked to review a business process diagram that was intended to capture current state for a service disruption planning process. I quickly found out that the challenge was not so much assessing the diagram itself, but resetting expectations of users that seemed to be already sold on the diagram, despite its numerous deficiencies. This is a classic pitfall in business process analysis (BPA).

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, January 3, 2008
11:14 PM

The $1,000,000 Netflix Prize competition has produced interesting results, even if no winner, 15 months in. Some of those results are a bit surprising; others we should have expected but didn't anticipate. So while participants haven't yet bettered the accuracy of Netflix' Cinematch recommendation algorithm by 10%, the threshold to win the $1 million prize, we can still take away lessons about predictive-analytics fundamentals.

I recently checked on competition status after receiving a note from Alex Lupu, VP Marketing USA for Scio Systems; Alex has been keeping me apprised of his company's progress toward launch of property-lease abstracting and analysis tools. Like Alex I'm into text analytics, and I liked his take that "intelligent communication between customer and the [Netflix suggestion] system" could provide an alternative route to better recommendations. Alex sees analysis of "'open questions' that allow customer to write a sentence or two" about movies as potentially beneficial in complementing traditional, pure-numbers predictive modeling. Alex says "assuming the customer is a static entity seems wrong to me, thus looking at databases only is not of much help."

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, January 3, 2008
11:08 AM

Data Quality expert Larry English (catch his keynote address at the next TDWI) has claimed data quality is the second biggest threat to human kind, after global warming. When I first read this statement, I thought it was hyperbole, meant to engage readers. But English makes some compelling arguments. Yesterday's cover story in USA Today is yet one more case to support Larry's dire claim: data quality problems threaten this year's presidential election process.

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
9:44 AM

Happy New Year! Have you ever wondered why every year in December we hear all these new BI predictions and trends for the following year? Should you invest the time and energy to listen and believe them? Well after being in the BI market for now 20 years, I have become more skeptical than optimistic about much of this hoopla. While they might sound interesting you should clearly examine the sources of information. If they come from a technology vendor executive, do they result in pushing their company’s agenda, or if they come from a consultant or firm is it helping market their services? What you do with BI has become more complex than simple and the exercise of coming up with predictions and trends might be limiting your perspective and not expanding it.