The ABCs of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - ITIL - CIO

This is important.... it will impact the life of a DBA and will greatly increase you opportunities for advncement if you learn the lingo! ITIL is not going away...

The ABCs of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - ITIL - CIO: "ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering IT services. What's the big deal about it, and why is it considered so important in corporate computing? We explain the basics before you hunker down with the books."

Hiring Business Intelligence Professionals

Hiring Business Intelligence Professionals: "The basic principles of supply and demand pertain to a company’s ability to recruit and retain business intelligence (BI) professionals. My company has been CONNECTing (forgive the pun) data warehousing and business intelligence professionals with consulting and employee positions since 1992. During this 15-year span, we have certainly experienced the cycles of both 1) more-demand-than-supply of qualified resources, and 2) more supply-than-demand of qualified resources. Based on predictions for 2007, get ready! Organizational demands for business intelligence capabilities will increase rapidly. This will make BI environments even more chaotic and the demands for hiring and retention even more significant. Good news for BI professionals that want to expand their careers!

To find and keep the best people, it takes an understanding of how to match the right person with the job – not just the one with the best technical skills. In their rush to fill open positions, managers can overlook that simple principle, resulting in a poor hire that causes more problems than it solves. There is also a tendency to hire people that remind us of ourselves rather than what the situation may really require. To get the best results, employers need a process that identifies employees who best fit your company based on facts, not just impressions."

Business Intelligence Review

Business Intelligence Review: "The pyramid model of BI is completely inadequate for today's world of externalized business, computer-savvy workforces and constant communication. The concepts of hierarchical decision-making and solitary decision-making are simply not tenable in most cases. Problem solving and decision-making happen at every level of today's flattened and distributed organizations. The second word in the phrase business intelligence is, after all, intelligence. What does it mean to provide intelligence to people and operations? How do systems become intelligent? The enemy of intelligent systems and organization is stasis. Becoming intelligent involves collaboration, sharing and the ability to publish and modify analytical applications, not just data."

iTunes + Netflix = Cancel Cable? - Consumerist

Good article... some commentary and my own experience with this on my new blog where I talk about this stuff more.

iTunes + Netflix = Cancel Cable? - Consumerist: "A blogger over at ZDNet realized that he could cancel part of his cable, order his shows on iTunes, watch movies on Netflix and save $300 a year.

Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with. Farewell Melissa Gilbert, Rachael Ray, and Paula Deen! You are thus banished from my home!

I'm currently interested in about 6 shows, all of which it turns out I can get on iTunes. Plus, Netflix handles all of my movie needs. If I'm generous with my iTunes figures, it adds up to about $300 in purchases each year, versus the $600 I pay for all of the 'variety' that Comcast provides me. The old model of just piping junk into my home simply doesn't make sense to me anymore."

New Year, New You - Editorial - CIO

Aspire to move up the ladder? This is a very good article...

New Year, New You - Editorial - CIO: "I speak to CIOs every day who confide that they would like their next opportunity to be something 'challenging' with a 'growing company' where they can provide 'leadership.' They have a generic understanding of what they want but no plan, no strategy, for achieving it. This never fails to amaze me. CIOs work so hard to be strategic in their technology leadership. Why not be strategic about your career?"

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed

Data Migration: Plan to Succeed: "Before listing the specifics of what data migration entails, let us first define it in the context of data storage. Data migration is a one-time activity that is undertaken for a specific purpose. The purpose can vary from organization to organization, but it must justify the need to undertake the endeavor in the first place. Because any time you migrate data there is an element of risk to the business, if you find yourself migrating the same data all the time, you have other issues in the environment that warrant examination."

Building the Imperfect Data Warehouse

Building the Imperfect Data Warehouse: "An imperfect data warehouse is one whose scope is something less than the enterprise. Instead, in a fit of practicality, the data warehouse is built for a subset of the data of the corporation. You know that there will be overlap and redundancy, but – in the interest of moving forward – you build a data warehouse anyway. "

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Microsoft Partners With Teradata In Business Intelligence

This is a pretty big deal... Teradata has is very popular among the largest enterprises.

Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Microsoft Partners With Teradata In Business Intelligence: "Microsoft plans to make its business intelligence software interoperable with Teradata's Enterprise Data Warehouse.

The two companies said they plan to work to offer integration between the Teradata product and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. The joint interoperability technologies are set for release by the end of the first quarter.

Microsoft Analysis Services is an OLAP server that provides a mechanism for delivering data to Microsoft analytic and reporting tools. The latest agreement means the analytic engine could work on top of the Teradata warehouse.

In addition, Microsoft and Teradata, which is a division of NCR that is being spun out into a standalone company, also plan to extend their interoperability efforts to include other Microsoft products, such as SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The latter includes Office Excel 2007, Windows SharePoint Services, and Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. "

Changes, new URL, etc. - OLAPBLOG.com

I just haven't been spending as much time as I want to on the blog the last couple of months... there are a number of reasons, but for the readers still visiting or with me in their RSS readers, let me give you my biggest reason - the business I have been building for nearly 3 years, got up to 8 employees and marquee clients, sold December 1st. Obviously, this kept me busy :) getting operations integrated with the new company is also a challenge that will continue.

Meanwhile there are a couple of improvements. Most significantly, a domain name I bought a year ago with some flimsy hopes, OLAPBLOG.com, is now active with the new Blogger beta. The RSS feeds are from there, and that is where all traffic goes now. Pretty cool I think, to have that title, even if this has turned into mainly a link blog :)

Next, I plan to spend alot of my time blogging on a new blog under my own domain name about a whole range of other subjects, inclduing being an entrepreneur, selling a company, running a business, and IT trends I see and some opinion. With some luck i'll have some unique insights. I will be sure to post the URL here when I feel it is ready to start.

In the meantime, I hope you'll still find the info a place here valuable. With a new committment to blogging there should be more than in the recent past!

Changes to Daylight Savings Time in 2007 may affect your databases (DB2, Oracle and others)

Changes to Daylight Savings Time in 2007 may affect your databases (DB2, Oracle and others): "In the United States the start and end of daylight savings times are being changed in 2007. Daylight savings time will now start on March 11, 2007 (rather than early April) and will end on November 4, 2007 (rather than late October). Canada has also decided to follow the same schedule. This may impact your databases so read on.

DB2, and other data servers, rely on the operating system clock to get the current date and time. There will of course be an operating system patch that you will have to apply to virtually all operating systems so that they will know of the time change. And internally, logs don't use time zone information (in DB2, Oracle or any other DB that I'm aware of) so there is no problem there. But there is one more issue to know about. Java SDK and JRE need a special patch. Without this patch your Java applications that work with timestamps will display the wrong time during the weeks of the changed DST. And if the Java application uses that time stamp (for scheduling purposes for example) they will behave incorrectly during this extended DST time. This includes your own Java Applications (and your JDBC applications) as well as the DB2 Control Center and Query Patroller.

Here is a link to more information and the patches that are available or will be available. This site also has links to the operating system patches for AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows, and Linux."

Blog changes...

Testing some things... dont panic!

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek

5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - News by InformationWeek: "In 2006, we saw more buzzwords describing the 'Webification' of the enterprise. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), mashups, Web 2.0, RSS feeds, Wikis, blogs, the rewritable Web, social networking spaces, group chat rooms -- no matter which aspect you're talking about, clearly something new is happening here. The trick is paying attention, because the Web services movement is producing better and more capable enterprise class applications, which can be deployed in a fraction of the time that more traditional apps took.

IT managers are using the combinations of various Web-based applications to piece together what they need done. For example, you can now take a mapping service such as Yahoo or Google Maps and tie in the location of your current sales leads to determine where to deploy your sales force. Many of these begin with one or more hosted applications and build from there. For some leading-edge examples, look at Zimbra for hosting enterprise-class e-mail, Amazon's S3 for offsite disk storage, basecamp.com for project management, Concur for expense reporting, and Jive Software's Clearspace for document and workflow management. All mix multiple applications using well-known, and, in most cases, open-source code. "