MDM Inter-operability

Can MDM hubs inter-operate? Without a whole lot of custom code or arcane proprietary interfaces?

I attended Aaron Zornes presentation on the state of MDM today at the MDM Summit Toronto and frankly I found it to be a bit depressing. First, no one product does everything well. So to do everything well, I might want to use more than one vendor, if that was possible. Second, I will get several vendors products together whether I want to or not due to MDM and RDM being bundled into the application stacks by the big vendors like Microsoft and Oracle.

If I am going to have several MDM products together, can these things talk to each other? Now I’m sure there lots of SI’s out there that would be happy to charge handsomely to build some custom interfaces. There may also be some proprietary interfaces out there but these will always behave differently depending on the vendor and each will have its custom setup.

What I’d really like to see is an industry standard protocol for MDM hubs so that there would be relatively predictable results when hubs work together and without a whole lot of custom code or setup to support.

I’ve never seen such a thing though, or even a discussion about it.

Data Modeling Jobs

Last week at IRMAC, I heard Karen Lopez talking about the severe shortage of experienced data modelers. Sadly, I drifted out of the field about 10 years ago when the jobs dried up. When I used ERwin, it was still owned by Logicworks. I still have a Logicworks shirt from one of their user conferences

So, if had stuck with it and been gainfully unemployed as a data modeler the last 10 years, would I be in big demand now?

#UWMath Reunion 2011

Saturday I attended the 2011 UWaterloo Math reunion, partly to take the tour that I missed on my 2009 25th anniversary reunion. On this tour I got to see the brand new Math 3 building that just opened. It has that stark minimalist look of many new public buildings where the budget is very tight but it does have a lot of natural light which makes it a pleasant place.

Other things I discovered on the tour:

They still have computer labs, I would have thought that personal laptops would make labs obsolete but there are lots of labs still and still open 24×7 as far as I could tell.

MathSOC is still there in the same place. The CSC is still there too. Hopefully the CSC couch is NOT still there, the office wasn’t open. Watsfic is gone though, perhaps moved somewhere else.

The Math 3rd floor lounge is now the “Comfy” and the new funiture certainly is comfy, you could easily sleep in one of those chairs. The C+D is still there too of course

The Red Room is long gone, can’t even tell where it was. But MFCF is still there, though instead of a Honeywell and a VAX there is a bunch of high end SGI and Sun (Oracle) servers.

They still hand in assignments on paper into that big mailbox with the slots. It looks like the same one that was there 25+ yuears ago. Unbelieveable, I thought they would use email and something like PDFs long ago.

And I forgot to look for the study table donated by our 25th anniversay reunion. The students do love the study tables setup around the Math building now.The have power and network connections and many were in use even on a Saturday afternoon.

CDMP Data Governance beta exam #datagovernance

I wrote the DAMA CDMP Data Governance beta exam recently. I scored 68%, which actually surprised me. Due to time constraints I only studied the data governance chapter of the DMBOK and attended the June MDM+DG conference in Toronto as study materials. That may have been good timing because there were some questions I recognized from material covered at the conference. There were also some questions that I didn’t understand what was being asked, which probably shows that I should have used a broader set of study materials.

This exam has a different feel from the other CDP exams, less technical, more shades of gray perhaps. I would characterize it as picking the most correct answer rather than just picking correct answer as on the more technical exams. I put that to the nature of data governance being more political than the other more technical areas. It was an interesting exam to write because of that.

I already have my CDMP so I didn’t really need to write it but beta exams are free and DAMA needs beta testers to validate the exam. If the beta is still open, I encourage anyone interested in data governance to give it a try. It helps DAMA get the exam validated and helps you to “know what you know”. It is also an interesting set of questions to work with.

RIM, ironically

Lots of bad news about RIM these days. Layoffs, their blackberry products cannot compete with iPhones and Androids etc. Ironically, at work I just received an upgrade to a BB Bold 9780 and it’s the first BB that I really like. It is small, simple, easy to use, nice screen and has great battery life. I’d consider buying one for myself.

I don’t use handhelds for graphical things, the screen is too small even on an Android or iPhone and I hate those virtual keyboards. For text, primarily email and twitter, the BB works great. With all these poor sales, I ought to be able to find a good deal too right?

Trying out Chrome

Trying out Google Chrome, having been a dedicated Firefox user for years. So far, everything works much the same and it is vastly faster. I now wonder how Firefox manages to be so slow.

I don’t see a downside to Chorme yet, except maybe wasting too much time playing Angry Birds. Being a Gmail, Greader, Gmaps and Google search user I suppose Chrome should work better but I never really had any issues with Firefox there anyway.

Goodbye Firefox? Hate to give up on it but speed is good, slow is not.

Oracle SQL Data Modeler 3.0 #oracle #datamodel

Oracle has made SQL Data Modeler free again with release 3.0. But how good is it? Sometimes free is good but free doesn’t always equate to a bargain. Is it a useful tool or just better than nothing, or maybe even worse than nothing?

It has been several years since I have had one of the big data modeling tools like ERwin or ER/Studio so it hard for me to compare.

One advantage I can see is that it can be widely deployed and avoid the ERwin ghetto where only one person has access to the data models because there is only one ERwin license. And perhaps, it might also encourage some companies to have data models at all since they perceive tools like ERwin as “too expensive”. It is also integrated into SQL Developer which most Oracle users would be using anyway so it is handy.

After a quick look it seems to cover all the basics, forward / reverse engineer, schema compare, etc. The overall feel though is very clunky like typing with gloves on. For a small schema it’s okay but get any significant number of tables in there and navigation is difficult, it is difficult to even get a sense of what the model looks like. To me, it is a tool for a small shop or a small project. For a big enterprise project, you probably still need to spend the big bucks for an enterprise tool. But it’s still nice to have SQL Data Modeler around for small cases. I use SQL Developer all the time so it is right there too.