By Karen Lopez on Monday, January 28, 2008 2:14 PM

Rajan Chandras has authored a review of Embarcadero's EA/Studio 1.5 for Intelligent Enterprise.

"EA/Studio Business Modeler is an entry-level but professional-looking business process modeling tool from Embarcadero Technologies, a company better known for its data modeling and database administration products, ER/Studio and DBArtisan, respectively. Now in its second major release — following an inaugural v1.0 release and v1.1 upgrade last year — EA/Studio is a mid-tier solution positioned above products like Visio, which are essentially diagramming tools, and below advanced process modeling tools such as IDS Scheer's ARIS Design Platform, Mega's Mega Process, ITP Commerce's Process Modeler for Visio, and MetaStorm's ProVision (acquired through Proforma). A free EA/Studio Community Edition released earlier this month gives you a taste of the tool's core business process modeling capabilities, but it lacks some of the helpful reporting and analysis capabilities of the $970 full version.

EA/Studio is aimed at organizations midway up the process modeling maturity curve: Organizations that would like to go beyond basic visual depiction of process flows (e.g. Visio diagrams) and towards more organized process design and metadata management as well as integrated process/data modeling, yet are not ready for a full-featured process modeling and execution environment."

What I found most interesting in the review was his mention of the EA/Studio Community Edition release.  I was not aware of this "free" edition.  Look for a future post on this edition here.

By Karen Lopez on Thursday, January 17, 2008 5:13 PM

Sun Acquires Open Source Developer

From Channel Insider

 

NEW YORK (Reuters)—Sun Microsystems Inc said on Wednesday it will buy open source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion, allowing it to expand into an estimated $15 billion database market.

Sun also reported preliminary results for its fiscal second quarter, saying it expected higher revenue and profit compared with the year-earlier period.

Sun said it will pay about $800 million in cash in exchange for all of MySQL stock and assume about $200 million in options as part of the deal.

The company said MySQL's open source database is widely used across operating systems, hardware vendors and applications, and are expected to bring new markets for Sun's systems, middleware and other technologies.

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, January 08, 2008 2:11 PM

Using Universal Data Models to Jumpstart Your Data Modeling Effort

15 January 2008 / 11 AM EST

In general, two thirds of an organization’s data consists of common constructs that are applicable to most organizations and the other one third has been customized for their own needs. This means that most data modeling efforts are often recreating what has already been built many times before. Not only that, but many data modeling efforts often lead to internal battles that can delay or even bring a project to a halt. Luckily, there are resources and tools that can help you jumpstart a new project and avoid "re-inventing the wheel" every time a new system needs to be developed or re-architected.

 

Register

Don't miss hearing first-hand from modeling expert and best selling author of The Data Model Resource Book series, Len Silverston, and ER/Studio Product Manager, Jason Tiret, as they walk through how you can save both time and money on data modeling and data warehouse projects using data model templates. This webinar will include how world-class organizations are using data model templates to:

• Jumpstart data modeling efforts
• Reduce development time and costs on new projects
• Facilitate standardization of existing data models

If you're evaluating data modeling tools and data model templates, or already have a project in place, Using Universal Data Models to Jumpstart Your Data Modeling Effort will help you understand what leading organizations are doing to realize the most ROI from their data modeling investments.

SPACE IS LIMITED

By Karen Lopez on Friday, December 21, 2007 12:46 PM

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?

 

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:33 PM

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 .

 

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 4:40 PM

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.

By Karen Lopez on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 7:05 PM

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.

By Karen Lopez on Friday, December 07, 2007 4:03 PM

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/

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, December 05, 2007 10:49 AM

On December 4, 2007, Danny Sandwell, one of the CA’s Enterprise Modeling Product Manager, conducted a session called Complete Compare 101.   For those of you that were not able to attend the live session, it was recorded and can be accessed on the PLC-Modeling website (in the News Section).  You must be logged in to view the replay information and presentation.

 

 

By Karen Lopez on Monday, November 26, 2007 5:29 PM

CIO magazine has interesting article on how to better recruit females for enterprise IT jobs.

 

Business technology needs broad-thinking candidates from a broad range of undergraduate and graduate curricula who want to learn how companies—not computers—work; who can work with a global project team, rather than with programming languages; and who can see business process linkages, rather than map out electronic connections.

Meanwhile, the collection of jobs that saddled business technology with its geeky image—network and data center administration, code maintenance, programming and help desk—may soon be centralized, automated or offloaded to outsourcers. The stereotypically inarticulate men with pocket protectors who hold these jobs—and who defined the image of the profession way back in the '70s—will soon retire en masse (taking with them their pocket protectors).

Now you need business analysts, program managers, vendor managers, relationship managers, information architects or process analysts. These jobs (any of which can lead to CIO) demand employees with excellent communication skills that many of the women you know have: the ability to speak, negotiate, influence others, write, analyze, manage projects or programs, and lead cultural change. These jobs are not about writing operating systems or learning programming languages. They are about helping companies change the way they work. "Driving changes that help the business generate more revenue, lower cost or improve customer service—cracking these business problems—that's fun!" says June Drewry, CIO of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.

 

Some good points in that article.  Having spent a few years as the Canadian Information Processing Society's national spokes person on this gender issue, I agree with a few points and disagree with others.  Let's start with the agreement part:

IT does a terrible job recruiting for IT careers. 

I'm not sure whether this is due to the fact that the marketers are mostly men and therefore us marketing messages that they'd want to hear or that all of IT is terrible at all marketing.  These recruiting errors start early, in the marketing literature of computing-related educational programs at colleges and universities.  If you visit some of the most prestigious computing programs you'll see bland descriptions of computing science and information systems programs -- all focused on things like "learn C++", "algorithms", and "good careers as programmers".   If the website is maintained by the computer science department you might even be wowed with some nifty flashing HTML or scrolling techniques from The Information Super Highway(tm). 

Visit a website of other professional-preparation programs like law or engineering and you'll see photographs of people actually talking to other people, smiles on their faces as the solve some intriguing societal problem.  At worst, you may find a link describing finite element analysis or even algorithms, but it won't be the focus of their recruiting pages.

You'll find the same scenario on the careers page of your local newspaper.  IT jobs will display some long list of foreign sounding terms  about computers (PeopleSoft, Microsoft, etc.) or even worse, a set of acronyms that sound as if the successful candidate will also suffer from food poisoning (SAP, ERP, CRUD, C#, CRM, etc.) .  Postings for IT jobs rarely focus to any degree on solving people problems.  In fact, they tend to describe jobs that require one to sit alone in a basement, staring at a monitor everyday.

We need to stop trying to drag techies up the Zachman Framework, against their will

I cringe every time I read a recruitment add for an enterprise architect or other strategic position that demands several years of hands on technical skills in very specific areas.  Sure, enterprise architects, data architects, and process architects need to have a thorough understanding of the technologies that help run the business, but they don't have to have done that job in order to understand the architectural role.  We don't demand that lawyers be police officers for 5 years before they can be legal experts.  We don't require that professional engineers be construction trades people or draftspeople before they can be engineers.  Why must all IT jobs start with 5-10 years of programming?  The reason why that may have been true10-20 years ago was that there used to be only a couple of routes to get into IT at all.  This was due to the fact that people didn't have 6 mainframes in their basement to get hands on experience with technology.  That left formal education and training as the primary route to a career in computers.  But those days are gone. 

Most DBAs I know are excellent technical professionals.  I think they'd do a wonderful job of data modeling or data architecture.  For many though, I think they'd hate it.   These guys (and most of them are men) love understanding, working with, and managing detailed technical nuances of their jobs.  They think I'm crazy for wanting to spend days and days with business users, working on process or data models.  As for me, I'd go crazy spending much time on indexing strategies or tuning someone else's SQL code day in and day out.   Whether it is differing Meyers Brigg profiles, DNA, or brain make up, people tend to be drawn to certain jobs.   When I see those job postings that are looking for the ideal candidate who will spend an equal time working in Row One and Row Five of the Data Column, I know that most likely the organization will spend a great deal of time talking to people who are very experienced at one end of column over the other end.  And with all the inherent risks associated with gender stereotyping, I'd say that women tend to be drawn to jobs that have more interaction with the business.  Not all women, just most.

If you are recruiting candidates for multiple roles (and who isn't), I'd recommend you recruit along the same rows but perhaps multiple columns.  Think Business and Data Analyst, not DBA Modeler.  Look for Programmer DBAs, not Programmer BPM architects.   Let people who are "good at what they do" do what they are good at.