Pages

Ads 468x60px

Labels

Monday 15 October 2007

Business Intelligence Utopia – Enabler 5: Extensible Data Models


Enabler 5 in my list for Business Intelligence Utopia are the ubiquitous, hard-working “Data Models”. Data Model is the heart of any software system and at a fundamental level provides placeholders for data elements to reside.
Business Intelligence systems with all its paraphernalia – Data Warehouses, Marts, Analytical & Mining systems etc. typically deals with the largest volume of data in any enterprise and hence data models are highly venerated in the Data Warehousing world.
At a high level, a good Data Warehouse data model has the following goals: (Corollary – If you are looking for a data modeler look for the following traits)
1) Understand the business domain of the organization
2) Understand at a granular level the data generated by the business processes
3) Realize that business data is an ever-changing commodity – So the placeholder provided by the data model should be relevant not only for the present but also for the future
4) Can be described at a conceptual and logical level to all relevant stakeholders
5) Should allow for non-complicated conversion to the physical world of databases or data repositories that is manipulated by software systems
Extensible Data models deal with all the 5 points mentioned above and more specifically has future-proofing as one of its stated goals. Such extensible models are also “consumption agnostic”, i.e. – it provides for comparable levels of performance irrespective of the way data is being consumed.
It is important for Business Intelligence practitioners to understand the goals of their data models before embarking to use specific techniques for implementation. Entity-Relationship & Dimensional modeling (http://www.rkimball.com) has been the lingua-franca of BI data modelers operating at the conceptual and logical levels. Newer techniques like Data Vault (http://www.danlinstedt.com/) also provides some interesting thoughts in building better logical models for Data Warehouses.
At the physical implementation level, relational databases still form the backbone of the BI infrastructure, supplemented by multi-dimensional data stores. Even in the relational world, traditionally dominated by row-major relational vendors like Oracle, SQL Server etc. there are column-major relational databases of the likes of Sybase IQ with claims of being built ground-up for data warehousing.
In this article on column major databases – http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html, there is reference to a new DW specific database architecture called Vertica. It makes for a fascinating read – http://www.vertica.com/datawarehousing. The physical layer is also seeing a lot of action with the entry of data warehousing appliance vendors like Netezza, Datallegro etc. (http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1009168).
The intent of this post can be summed up as:
a) Understand the goals of building data models for your enterprise – Make it extensible and future proof
b) Know the current techniques that help envisage and build data models
c) Be on the look-out for new developments in the data modeling and database world – There is lot of interesting action happening in this area right now.
Extensible data models combined with the right technique for implementing them, lists as Enabler 5 in the “Power of Ten” for implementing Business Intelligence Utopia .





Wednesday 3 October 2007

Business Intelligence Utopia – Enabler 4: Service Oriented Architecture


Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and its closest identifiable alter-ego “Web Services” is another example of hyped-up, much maligned technology buzzword that takes at least 2 or 3 slides in any “bleeding-edge” technology presentation. Having said that, whatever I have investigated on Service Oriented Architectural concepts till now, is enough to warrant its listing as enabler no. 4 for Business Intelligence Utopia.
There are many powerful ways through which SOA can add significant value to the BI environment. The kind of BI, performance management and data integration artifacts that can be developed and published as web services include: Queries, Reports,  OLAP slice services (MDX queries), Scoring and predictive models, Alerts, Scorecards, Budgets, Plans, BAM agents, Decisions (i.e., automated decision services), Data integration workflows, Federated queries and much more. You can get more information at the link: http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/view-articles/4729
But the idea that fascinates me with respect to Business Intelligence on SOA, is the concept of “Analytical Smorgasbord”. Imagine a scenario where the business user can assemble their own analytical components from a mélange of available ones, resulting in complete customization of information for the user to take his/her decisions. Each of these available analytical components is self-contained and performs a particular piece of BI functionality. These components are ‘Web-Services’ and the SOA in such an enterprise is all about –
a) How are these components created?
b) How do the components interact?
c) How is the information published and consumed, in a secure manner?
The concept of “Analytical Smorgasbord” truly empowers the business users and is a powerful way to enable, what Gartner terms, as “Information Democracy” in the enterprise. It is important to note that the concept of analytical aggregation changes the Data Warehousing paradigm in a profound way – From “Pulling data” to “Seeking data”. In more simplistic terms, the end-user analytics should go and fetch data wherever it is rather than expecting all data to be consolidated into one data repository (typically a data warehouse or data mart). More on this in future posts, under the topic of “Guided Analytics”.
The true intent of this post is to encourage the BI community to start looking at SOA from the end-user analytical standpoint, so that web-services does not remain a mere technology toy but really helps in “Putting the business back in BI” – http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/display.aspx?id=7913
I have intentionally left out the technology details related to SOA. You can find wonderful resources on the web like this one: http://www.dmreview.com/portals/portal.cfm?topicId=1035908 It is becoming increasingly important for BI practitioners to acquire/develop knowledge on Web technologies, XML, SOAP, UDDI, etc. as different domains are converging at a rapid pace..
Enabler 4 in the “Power of Ten” is more precisely defined as – Service Oriented Architecture enabling the creation of BI “Analytical Smorgasbord”.

You might want to read these awesome related posts Business Intelligence Utopia