So if data modeling has been around for decades, I thought I'd check Google Trends to see how some of the newer terms would show.  First, I started with ITIL.    Google Trends allows you to report on trends only as far back as Jan 2004, so ITIL shows a fairly slow rise in search popularity.

Next I tried IT Service Management (ITSM), a related term.  The trend shows that ITSM was not popular enough to be tracked by Google Trends until about February 2004.  By watching those trend lines, you can pretty much tell when a term got buzz.

So in the above sample, you can see the birth of a buzzword.  My guess is that as long as the lines remain steady or increasing, the term may progress from buzzword to silver bullet to standard of practice.  Maybe.

Sometimes terms are popular in a small enough user base, or have small popularity in a larger user base that there is insufficient data for reporting.  For example, if you type in agile modelings, you will get a page that looks like the sample figure below.

This just means that the term has not had enough searches to reach the popularity requirement for reporting in Google Trends.  I'm curious, though, as to when terms "make it". 

I'll write more later about trends and looking to the past.

Google Labs always offers a set of nifty tools for sorting through the billions of pieces of data and information that pass through their servers.  One new and interesting feature is Google Trends.  Trends reports on the history of search terms, reporting the top search origins for a search term as well as the trend in how often it has been searched for.

So I typed in data model and found something that surprised me.  The top location of searchers for data model is....Bangalore, India.  In fact, the top 5 positions for people seeking more information about data modelings is India.  The figure below is a sample of the information returned by Google trends.

Singapore is next, and then it is Washington, DC breaking in to the list at position seven.    If you read into the help portion of this tool, you'll find that the result are determined based on sampling the massive amount of server log data they collect as each visitor uses their sight. 

So does the fat that 7 of top ten positions on this list are located outside North America mean that more non-NA people are learning data modeling?  Could it mean that more outside the US are working on data models?  Could it mean that there aren't enough people in the US working in IT to break out higher in the list?  We won't know just from looking at this data.  Perhaps a better test would be to look at sales of data modeling books in each country?  Or the numbers of students taking courses in data management.  Or...

What are your guesses as to the significance of this data?

I've added a new article by Peter Stiglich on Enabling High Quality Analytics Through a Data Validity Dimension.  Peter's approach is interested -- who knew that using the cartesian product was going to be so helpful?

Data Quality

While working on an Enterprise Data Warehouse for a state court system the issue of poor data quality in the source systems became apparent.  Referential integrity was not strictly enforced and there was very little in the way of attribute level constraints.  One normally expects that these types of constraints be enforced for an OLTP application, whether through the application, in the database, or both.     

 

Of course, one should never be surprised when there is poor data quality in the source systems – poor data quality is the norm rather than the exception.  According to The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) over $600 billion a year is lost due to poor data quality. 

If you are interested in submitting an articled, send it to website@infoadvisors.com for review.

Barry Williams, of Database Answers,  has one of the most comprehensive lists of data model tools I've seen.  Some of the entries are fairly obsolete, but if you wanted to know what's out there, this would be a good place to start.  This list includes open source, commercial, free, modeling tools (or modelling tools, if you spell it that way).

This recent CNET News.com article about owners of Toyota Prius hacking the control systems of their automobiles started me thinking about hacks, easter eggs, and other mods users make to sofware applications.

It has only been a few years that we modeling tool users have had the ability to change the fonts, backgrounds, colors, and other usability features in our tools.  Before that, we often had to resort to printed material or image capture to highly parts of our models or to get extended features.

I've often wondered if there are easter eggs in any of these products.  From eeggs.com:

What is an "Easter Egg"?

In the context of software (get that Cadbury Bunny out of your head!), an Easter Egg is a hidden feature or novelty that the programmers have put in their software. In general, it is any hidden, entertaining thing that a creator hides in their creation only for their own personal reasons. This can be anything from a hidden list of the developers, to hidden commands, to jokes, to funny animations. You'd be surprised just how many things contain Easter Eggs... just look at the list that has accumulated here!

A true Easter Egg must satisfy the following criteria:

1. Undocumented, Hidden, and Non-Obvious
   An Easter Egg can't be a legitimate feature of a product, or be an obvious part of a storyline. Easter Eggs will usually stand out either because they totally don't fit with their context (like a pinball game in a word processor), or because they have a deeper hidden personal meaning to the creators, so they threw it in for entertainment.
2. Reproducible
   Every user with the same product or combination of products must be able to produce the same result given the instructions. If others can't reproduce an Egg, then it doesn't belong in this archive.
3. Put There by the Creators for Personal Reasons
   The Egg must have been put there on purpose, and furthermore have a personal significance to the creators beyond just making a better product (movie, TV show, software program, etc).
4. Not Malicious
   Easter Eggs are there for fun, not to do damage.
5. ENTERTAINING!
   The most important element... if it's not there for entertainment, it's not an Egg.

I've never seen anyone report an easter egg in a modeling tool...have you?