A while back I posted a blog entry about Microsoft's feature addition to Visual Studio - Entities (or ADO Entity Data Model).  In that post, I complained that the "redefining" of the term Entity Data Model was going to lead to even more confusion on development projects.

Today I watched an online video of using Visual Studio to work with Entity Data Model functions .  While it didn't help assuage my misgivings about calling this feature Entity Data Modeling, it did help me understand what Microsoft means by data modeling.  For now, it appears to be database modeling via reverse engineering of databases.

One of the things I did note, though, was that I preferred some of the graphical presentation features of the actual entities.  The gradient shading and the drop shadows gave the models more visual appeal than most tools I work with.  I know that these sorts of features come with a performance price, but I still think they were more visually pleasing.

I'm thinking of giving Visual Studio a try to see how these graphical features come out in printing and other presentations.

What do you think of them?

The CA Modeling Product Line Community (PLC) is looking for volunteers to serve on the PLC Modeling Board.  It is my understanding that you must be a current user of CA ERwin products and be employed by a non-partner organization.

Now through Janurary 31, 2008, we are seeking nominations from CA ERwin users in this community, who are interested in serving as a member of the PLC Board. The primary role of the board is to act as the voice of the global user community by providing leadership in supporting members interests and liasing with CA, and to support and encourage growth of local user groups.

These PLC board positions are being offered to you, as CA ERwin users. All members of the PLC Modeling community will vote for the candidates of their choice.

PLC governance is owned by officers of the board & it's members. For your PLC, the board will be representing the entire virtual product line community member base, including local user groups and users who do not have local groups in their area. This governing body will be responsible for these types of functions.

Develops and monitors budget
Has fiduciary responsibility of the PLC
Maintain communication channel with CA's Customer Program office, local user groups, PLC members, and the modeling tool development lab.

Facilitate the prioritization and voting of certain product enhancement requests upport local user group activities as seen appropriate by the PLC Board Serving a 2 year term, the PLC Board will need to have a minimum of 3 officers; maximum of 6 officers, as deemed necessary to govern your PLC.

In addition to being able to give back to the global CA ERwin user community, I'd think that being a member of the board would have great networking benefits -- with other ERwin user organizations and with CA staff and product management.

For more information or to nominate yourself, visit http://causergroups.ca.com/usergroups/News.aspx?ID=397 .

End of service has been announced for version 7.0 of CA ERwin Data Modeler, CA ERwin Model Manager, CA ERwin Model Navigator, and CA ERwin Model Validator in the next 12 months.

The announcement mentions a future general release of version 7.3 of these products.

...and if you are still working with ERwin 7.0 and not the current release of 7.2, I highly recommend you upgrade.

Today I am presenting Collaborating with Techs at Toronto IRMAC.  This presentation, which I've also given at DAMA Portland and the New York Enterprise Modeling User Group (NYEMUG), focuses mainly on collaborating with different generations of IT workers. 

Our work environment today involves collaborating with four generations of workers.  The gap between work- and lifestyles of our multi-generation teams can become a real issue with collaboration.  One of the main issues is how the different generations prefer to communicate, including formats and locations.

A very popular YouTube video, orginally developed to influence teaching styles in  a Colorado school system, touches on some of the same issues.  Specifically, it highlights differences between today's youngest generation of students and workers.  The video is 8 minutes long.  While it includes music, you can watch it with your speakers muted as the sound is only background (for those of you who fill older generations and are concerned with the appearance of work).

I wish I had time in my presentation to include this video. Perhaps I'll find time to include it in my related Tutorial at the DAMA conference.

An anonymous blogger has started writinga series of posts of his experiments with database design and performance.  His profile describes him as "A Seattle database guy who works at start ups."

In the last article the performance impact of joins was shown.  This one will demonstrate cases where denormalized joins are a bit faster, as will the third article with larger data volumes.  The fourth article, the most interesting one, will show where a denormalized data model can be 50 times faster than a normalized data model. 

Here are the tables that will be involved in the sql.  The normalized ProductSmall table has a 100 million rows and is about 0.67 gig. 

What I appreciate about his posts is the fact that he is supporting his positions with actual tests.  So far his two blog posts have focused on very large tables (more than a million rows) and the impact of memory usage.

I'd also like to see him post about working with smaller data volumes.  For instance, I work at times with new developers who tell me that our database or table is "very large" at 4,000 rows and needs a great deal of denormalization for performance reasons.  I usually ask them to run tests similar to what the DBScience guy is doing to show me all the great benefits of combining 6 tables into one table with a total of 10,000 rows.

Check out his blog as he adds articles. http://dbscience.blogspot.com/